2017 International Conference on Data Management, Analytics and Innovation (ICDMAI)

Zeal Education Society, Pune, India, Feb 24-26, 2017

IDENTIFICATION OF UNDERGROUND CABLE

FAULT LOCATION AND DEVELOPMENT
Mr. M. R. Hans
Zeal College of Engineering and
Research, Narhe, Pune, Maharashtra,
India
manoj.hans@zealeducation.com
Ms. Snehal C. Kor Ms. A. S. Patil
Zeal College of Engineering and Zeal College of Engineering and
Research, Narhe, Pune, Maharashtra, Research, Narhe, Pune, Maharashtra,
India India
kor.snehal@yahoo.com anupama.patil@zealeducation.com

A. MURRAY LOOP METHOD

Abstract: As India emerging as a developing country, civilized
area is also increasing day by day. As underground cables are
best under such conditions its utilization is also growing because
of its obvious advantages like lower transmission losses, lower
maintenance cost and they are less susceptible to the impacts of
severe weather and so many. But it is having few disadvantages
too like expensive installation and detection of fault location. As
it is not visible it becomes difficult to find exact location of
thefault. In this paper we present two methods which will be very
useful to identify the exact distance of fault of underground
system from base station. One of the methods is Murray loop
method and other one is Ohm’s Law Method.
Murray loop method uses the whetstone bridge to
calculate exact distance of fault location from base station and
sends it to the user mobile. Whereas in Ohm’s law method, when
any fault occurs, voltage drop will vary depending on the length
of fault in cable, since the current varies. Both the methods use
voltage convertor, microcontroller and potentiometer to find the
fault location under LG, LL, LLL faults.
Keywords: detection of fault, Murray loop, Ohm’s Law, distance of
fault, microcontroller, potentiometer.
I. INTRODUCTION
It is very crucial to maintain reliability of power
system. That is why it is required to minimize the fault
occurrence in power system and fasten the clearance of fault.
Murray loop test is simple basic method to
localize cable fault testing. This method uses basic equipment
that obtained easily. This test is performed for the location of
either an earth fault or short circuit fault in underground cable.
In these tests the resistance of fault does not affect the results
obtained except when the resistance of fault is very high.
There are two loop tests usually used and are known as
MurrayLoop and Varley Loop Test. This test works on the
principle of Wheatstone bridge.
This test is used to find the fault location in an
underground cable by making one Wheatstone bridge in it and
by comparing the resistance we shall find out the fault
location. But we should use the known length of the cables in
this experiment. The necessary connection of the Murray loop
testis shown in figure 1 and 2. The figure 1 shows that the
circuit connection for finding the fault location when the
ground fault occurs and the figure 2 shows that the circuit
connections for finding the fault location when the short
circuit fault occurs.

It needs accurate and fast method to identify the

faults and its clearance so that power disturbance can be
resolved in very short period of time. In overhead system it is
quite easy to fine the faulty area than underground system
because of few obvious reasons. There are so many techniques
in overhead system like Phasor Measurement Unit which is
capable of identifying the accurate location of fault and its
types. But in case of underground systems such systems Figure 1: Circuit Connection of Murray Loop test for
cannot be used. Two methods presented in this paper can
resolve this problem related to underground system. Both of ground fault.
these methods are very fast and accurate in finding the fault
location therefore can be proved very useful. Let’s discuss In this test, the faulty cable is connected with sound
these methods in detail. cable by a low resistance wire, because that resistance should

978-1-5090-4083-4/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE 5

not affect the total resistance of the cable and it should be able ripples are removed using a capacitive filter and it is then
to circulate the loop current to the bridge circuits without loss. regulated to +5V using a voltage regulator 7805 which is
The variable resistors P and Q are forming the ratio required for the operation of the microcontroller and other
arms. Balance of the bridge is achieved by adjusting the components.
variable resistors. ‘G’ is the galvanometer to indicate the
balance. [R + X] is the total loop resistance formed by the
sound cable and the faulty cable. At the balance condition,
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ൌ ‫ب‬ ൌ
ܳ ܺ  ܺ


ܺൌ ሺܴ ൅ ܺሻ
ܲ൅ܳ

When the cross section area of the both sound cable and
faulty cable are equal, then the resistances of the conductors
are directly proportional to their lengths. So, if L X represents
the length between tests end to the fault end of the faulty cable
and if L represents the total length of the both cables, then the
expression for LX is as follows;
ܳ
‫ ܺܮ‬ൌ ‫ܮ‬
ܲ൅ܳ
Figure 2: Block diagram of Murray Loop Method

The above test is only valid when the lengths of the
cables are known. In Murray Loop Test, the current
circulation through the cable would cause temperature rises
due to high voltage or high current. If the resistance varies
according to the temperature, then the balance collapses. So,
we need to apply less voltage or less current to this circuit.
B. OHM’S LAW METHOD:
In this method simple OHM’s law is used to locate
the short circuit fault. A DC voltage is applied at the feeder
end through a series resistor, depending upon the length of
fault of the cable current varies. The voltage drop across the
series resistor changes accordingly, this voltage drop is used
in determination of fault location.
This method is assembled with a set of resistors representing
cable length in KMs and fault creation is made by a set of
switches at every known KM to cross check the accuracy of
the same. The voltage drop across the feeder resistor is given
to an ADC which develops a precise digital data which the
programmed microcontroller would display the same in Kilo
meters. The fault occurring at what distance and which phase
is displayed on a 16X2 LCD interfaced with the
microcontroller. In this method we use a microcontroller
ATMega8 which is of 8-bit. The program is burned into ROM
of microcontroller written in either Embedded C or assembly
language. The power supply consists of a step down
transformer 230/12V, which steps down the voltage to 12V
AC. This is converted to DC using a Bridge rectifier. The
The power supply circuit which is used to run the set up
consists of step down transformer which is 230 V step-down
to 12 V. In this circuitDB107 is used to form bridge rectifier
which delivers pulsating dc voltage & then fed to capacitor
filter the output voltage from rectifier is fed to filter to
eliminate any a. c. components present even after
rectification. The filtered DC voltage is given to regulator to
produce 12 V constant DC voltages.
II. SIMULATION
The simulation presented here is used to detect the actual
distance of the fault by using both the methods explained
above as Murray loop method and Ohm’s law method.
Simulation program for both the methods is common. When
we execute the presented simulation program it will first work
on the Ohm’s law depending upon the reduction in voltages
and increment in current as an effect of fault occurrence which
will be helpful for detection of open circuit fault i.e. L-L fault.
After this execution simulation will be again executed for
further short circuit faults i.e. L-G faults which will be based
on Murray loop method.
Bridge methods used for locating faults in underground cables
are based on modified Wheatstone circuit where direct current
is used to measure the resistance in order to calculate distance
of the fault in percentage of the total line length. Murray and
Glaser bridges use the use similar principles for calculating
the distance of the fault. Brief descriptions of these bridges are
given as follows.

6
A Murray bridge loop for cable fault location. Besides the
faulty conductor, one healthy conductor is required as
connected to terminal T1 in the measuring circuit. External
loop wires in the circuit, connecting the resistances at the front
and the conductors at the cable end, should have close to zero
resistance. Fault distances can be calculated from the resistor
values using the conductor resistance per unit length of cable.
The figure below shows a simulation model for the proposed
method of detecting an exact fault location (distance from
base station). The simulation has considered a three phase
system and 1 kΩ resistance is used to indicate the distance of
10 km. connections are arranged so that the Wheatstone
bridge connection is fulfilled.
Figure 4: Display showing L-L fault

Figure 3: Simulation model for faulty area detection.

As we execute this simulation it will first verify the Ohm’s

law as when the fault occurs, there is a voltage drop and Figure 5: Display showing L-L-L fault
therefore there will be the rise in current which will be
scanned by the potentiometer and signals are forwarded to the
ADC which in turn gives the accurate distance of L-L fault.
The potentiometer used MCP41xxx will vary resistances till
the null point is reached (balanced bridge condition), as this
condition is reached using Wheatstone bridge concept,
distance of ground faults can be calculated. These results are
shown in the fig below.

Figure 6: Display showing L-G fault

7
 III. HARDWARE IMPLEMENTATION IV. CONCLUSION
We have seen the results of simulation under all the faulty
conditions and from that we can conclude that the fault
distance can be calculated successfully by using this project.
Therefore different types of fault analysis and fault location
can be done with ease. Simulation results and prototype’s
results are matching with the distance at which fault is created.
Development for a wide range of cable length will be made in
the further work in terms of safety and compact size for field
measurements.

REFERENCES
[1] R. Salat and S. Osowski, "Accurate fault location in the power
Figure 7: Hardware model of the project transmission line using support vector machine approach," Power
Systems, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 19, pp. 979-986, 2004.
[2] R. H. Salim, et al., "Extended fault-location formulation for power
TABLE 1: RESULTS OBTAINED ON THE HARDWARE distribution systems," IEEE Transactions on Power Delivery, vol. 24,
pp. 508-516, 2009.
For LG Fault in B Phase [3] HeenaSharma,M.T.Deshpande,RahulPande “Different types of fault
Analysis and Techniques of Fault Location Using
Actual Simulation Hardware PSCAD”,Internation Journal of Emerging Technology and Advanced
Accuracy Accuracy Engineering(2250-2459)May2013
Distance Results Results
(%) (%) [4] Qinghai Shi, Troeltzsch U, Kanoun O. Detection and localization of
(km) (km) (km)
cable faults by time and frequency domain measurements. Conf.
2 2.14 93 1.69 84.5 Systems and Signals and Devices, 7th International conference,
Amman.2010; 1-6.
3 3.15 95 2.78 92.67 [5] M.-S. Choi, D.-S. Lee, and X. Yang, “A line to ground fault location
algorithm for underground cable system,” KIEE Trans. Power Eng., pp.
4 4.24 94 3.88 97 267–273, Jun. 2005.
[6] T. S. Sidhu and Z. Xu, “Detection of incipient faults in distribution
5 5.34 93.2 4.81 96.2 underground cables”, IEEE Trans. Power Del., vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 1363–
1371, Jul. 2010.
6 6.35 94.17 5.91 98.5
7 7.36 94.86 6.84 97.71
8 8.46 94.25 7.94 99.25
9 9.47 94.78 8.88 98.67
For LL Fault in Y-B phase
Actual Simulation Hardware
Accuracy Accuracy
Distance Results Results
(%) (%)
(km) (km) (km)

2 2.04 98 2.01 99.5

3 3.04 98.67 3.25 91.67
4 4.05 98.75 4.02 99.5
5 5.05 99 5.1 98
6 6 100 6.15 97.5
7 6.99 99.86 7.19 97.29
8 7.97 99.63 8.23 97.13
9 8.95 99.44 9.28 96.89
Average Accuracy is above 95%