It’s critical to calibrate the arrival time of traveling wave in traveling wave fault location. However, when zero crossing fault or a short to ground through high impedance fault appear in the power system traveling wave signal will be relatively weak, and singular judgment traveling wave method mutations occur significant errors. In order to accurately capture the fault transient traveling wave, the paper proposes a new method to identify the traveling wave. By analyzing the traveling wave transmission characteristics and building an estimated capacity of traveling wave mathematical model, the method applies Unscented Kalman filter state to identify traveling wave head and obtain traveling wave arrival time to fault detection device. The simulation results show that even in the low SNR, this method can still identify the traveling wave, with good practicability.
Key words: traveling wave location, transient traveling wave, Unscented Kalman filter, wave head detecting, State estimation algorithm.