An intelligent boundary switch is a three-phase outdoor power distribution device equipped with a controller. It is installed at the boundary point on the medium voltage overhead distribution lines. It can automatically remove the single-phase-to-ground fault and isolation phase-to-phase short-circuit fault. Firstly, the structure of an intelligent boundary switch is studied, and then the fault detection principle is also investigated. The single-phase-to-ground fault and phase-to-phase short-circuit fault are studied respectively. A method using overcurrent to judge the short-circuit fault is presented. The characteristics of the single-phase-to-ground fault on an ungrounded distribution system and compositional grounded distribution system are analyzed. Based on these characteristics, a method using zero sequence current to detect the single-phase-to-ground fault is proposed. The research results of this paper give a reference for the specification and use of intelligent boundary switches.

When a single line-to-ground fault occurs in the ungrounded distribution system, the steady-state fault current is relatively small for fault analysis and the transient fault current is observable, which can be used for faulted feeder identification and location. The principal frequency component retains most of the characteristics of the transient current. The principal frequency is related to the distance from the fault point to the substation and can be used for fault location. This paper analyzes the sequence network model of a single line-to-ground fault in the distribution network, and gives a method for principal frequency calculation. Depending on the characteristics of the maximum amplitude of the principal frequency component of the faulted feeder, the method of faulted feeder identification is given. Based on the complementary characteristics of the phase angle of the principal frequency component of the fault current and the phase angle at the substation bus, the faulted section location is carried out. MATLAB simulation is used to verify the effectiveness of the faulted feeder identification and location method.

Low-power consumption and long-distance transmission are two problems that have to be solved by the application of broadband power line communication for the automatic meter reading system. To reduce the power consumption of the communication module, based on the analysis of the composition of the power consumption, some methods are proposed. From the communication chip level and the module circuit level, the design scheme of low-power consumption is given. To solve the problem of transmission distance, a frequency band of 2.44 MHz~5.6 MHz is used as the main working frequency band. The communication module supports multiple frequency bands. Using this feature, the optimal frequency band is adaptively selected for communication and automatic switching, which further improve the transmission distance. Field application shows that the above methods effectively decrease the power consumption of the communication module and extend the transmission distance.

As for a single line-to-ground fault in an ungrounded distribution system, the power-frequency current is too low to detect the fault. The transient current is more palpable than that at a power-frequency of 50 or 60 Hz. It is an effective method to estimate the fault using the transient fault current. To analyze and calculate the transient current of single line-to-ground faults, an equivalent circuit is proposed in this paper. This model is based on distributed parameters of power lines. And it contains positive, negative and zero sequence information. The transient equivalent circuit consists of equivalent resistance, equivalent inductance and equivalent capacitance. And the method of calculation the equivalent ele- ments is also submitted.MATLAB simulation results showthat the newtransient equivalent circuit has higher accuracy and stronger adaptability compared with the traditional one.