Detection and Line Selection of Series Arc Fault in Multi-Load Circuit

In order to study a kind of detection and line selection method of arc fault in actual power supply and distribution lines, arc fault experiments with multi-load loop were carried out. First, five-layer decomposition of main loop current was made by using wavelet packet. The effective coefficients were selected based on the change rate of a wavelet packet energy entropy before and after the arc fault occurs. Then, an effective signal of the arc fault was reconstructed. Second, the effective signal was decomposed into seven independent modes with a variational mode decomposition method. Its time–frequency distribution was obtained by solving the Wigner–Ville distribution and performing a linear summation of each mode. Third, the time-domain and time–frequency features of arc fault were extracted by analyzing the time-domain waveform and time–frequency distribution of the effective signal. An arc fault identification and line-selection model was established by using a support vector machine optimized by particle swarm optimization and grid search. Then, the accuracy of both arc fault detection and line selection were tested. Test results indicated that the proposed method can detect effectively arc fault and select fault line accurately.