Geometry of Distance Protection

Abstract

Distance relays detect faults on transmission lines. They face uncertainty from the fault's location and resistance, as well as the current from the line's remote terminal. In this paper, we aggregate this uncertainty with the Minkowski sum. This allows us to explicitly model the power grid surrounding the relay's line, and in turn accommodate any mix of synchronous machines and inverter-based resources. To make the relay's task easier, inverters can inject perturbations, or auxiliary signals, such as negative-sequence current. We use Farkas' lemma to construct an optimization for designing inverter auxiliary signals.