When fault occurs on a collector line of a wind farm, it needs to be located quickly and accurately to avoid the economic losses caused by the outage of wind turbines. The existing fault locating algorithms only consider single-branched lines, while in actual projects, power lines generally contain multiple branches, making the algorithms unable to locate the fault accurately. To improve the algorithm performance, this study first analyzes the cause of suspected locations, and then the principle of adding minimum number of measuring devices for single phase ground fault location of multi-branch lines is given.  Based on that, a fault locating method using multi-terminal data and line topology structure is proposed. Finally, the effectiveness and practicability of the proposed method are verified by PSCAD/EMTDC simulation.

wind farm,collector line,single-phase ground fault,fault locating,multi-branch lines