Advances on Fault Detection Techniques for Resonant Grounded Power Distribution Networks in Bushfire Prone Areas: Identification of Faulty Feeders, Faulty Phases, Faulty Sections, and Fault Locations

Bushfires are catastrophic events which cause scathing impacts globally on human lives and economies of different countries around the world. Powerline faults are considered as a key reason for several devastating bushfires where single line-to-ground (SLG) faults are generally responsible for such events. A powerline safety technology called, the rapid earth fault current limiter (REFCL) that works based on the resonant grounding (RG) technique is currently being utilized to reduce the fault current so that bushfire risks can be prevented. The resonant grounding technique poses challenges to detect faults (i.e., feeder, phases, and locations) with existing protection relays and circuit breakers. Moreover, the sampling frequency of field devices play a key role for developing advanced fault detection schemes using different techniques. In recent years, there have been significant progresses to develop new techniques. This paper provides a systematic and comprehensive of existing techniques for the fault detection in resonant grounded networks from the perspective of the faulty feeders, faulty phases, faulty sections, and fault locations to demonstrate the recent advances and identify the scopes for further research based on problems in existing methods. An exhaustive analysis of existing literature clearly shows that attentions have been paid mostly for the faulty feeder detection and then for identifying faulty phases while there are only few approaches for locating SLG faults in resonant grounded distribution network. Moreover, none of these approaches is developed by considering the high impedance faults on power networks in bushfire prone areas and the sampling frequency of field devices used for measurements. Other approaches used for resonant grounded networks (RGNs) for different perspectives are also presented in this work.