Faulty phase identification and ground detection in TCSC compensated lines integrated with wind farms

Nowadays there is a trend for offshore wind farms to be connected with power grids through a TCSC series controlled compensating device employed in transmission lines for the improvement of large power flows. In such transmission lines, faulty phase identification and ground detection create a challenge for conventional distance relaying schemes because of non-linear output power fluctuation due to variations in wind speed and different firing angle operations of TCSC. Therefore, to overcome the problem of such transmission lines relaying, a novel time-frequency analysis-based intrinsic time scale decomposition (ITD) method is proposed in this paper. The proposed intrinsic time scale decomposition method uses only a three-phase grid side current from relaying end for faulty phase and ground detection and ITD supported random forest classifier for fault classification accuracy approach. The evaluation of the proposed scheme is tested on several fault cases with varying system parameters and non-fault transient events through the EMTDC/PSCAD platform during different wind speeds and varying firing angle operations of TCSC. The performance of the proposed scheme is also verified through a real-time interface dSPACE DS 1104 control prototype hardware. Finally, a comparison analysis with existing techniques demonstrated the effectiveness of the presented method to assess the mentioned problem of the conventional protective relaying schemes. The proposed method demonstrated a 100% accuracy for faulty phase selection and a 99.99% accuracy for fault classification.