الفهرس 
ContentsOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Since recent societies become more hooked into electricity, a higher level of supply continuity is required from power systems. The expansion of those systems makes them liable to electrical faults and failures. As a result of these failures, the faulty element must be disconnected and isolated as soon as possible to reduce damage and remove the emergency state from the whole system. This forces utility operators in speeding up fault detection and system recovery and subsequently decreasing blackout time. All these conditions have raised the value of investigating techniques for the fast locating of faulted areas in power systems. In this thesis, a comparative framework that investigates a wide number of fault location strategies for AC distribution systems is presented to stand for the effectiveness and accuracy of each strategy. from this review framework, Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) based techniques show a great behavior to locate faulted points in distribution networks. Thus, this thesis proposed a new technique which uses measurements provided from these units. Implementing measurements obtained from PMUs in fault location algorithm faces an economic and technical issue due to PMUs installation methodology in the network. Since installing PMUs at all nodes of power network is uneconomic issue and untechnical due to the lack of communication facilities, identifying the optimum number of these devices and their locations keeping system observability is a critical goal. To get over this issue, a proposed mathematical optimization technique (Binary Integer Programming) is applied to reach the optimum number of PMUs. The thesis proposes a new technique for online tracking of fault location in distribution networks based on measurements available from optimally installed PMUs and Iterative Support Detection (ISD) technique. from the voltage change vector provided by installed PMUs and system impedance matrix, a current change vector involving a nonzero element corresponds to the faulty point is obtained. Since PMUs are not placed at all buses, the acquired system equation is underdetermined. Therefore, ISD technique is used to recover the current vector from few measurements available from PMUs, hence fault location is identified easily once non zero values in the current vector are recovered.