  It is very important to locate the short-circuit fault in a power system
quickly and accurately. Electromagnetic time reversal (EMTR) has drawn
increasing attention because of its clear physical background and excellent
performance. This paper studies the EMTR method for locating the short-circuit
fault of transmission and distribution lines with or without branches, and
introduces a simulated annealing algorithm to accelerate the calculation of an
EMTR fault location. This algorithm is different from the traditional
exhaustive method in that it solves the corresponding optimization problem,
thus improving the location speed by up to an order of magnitude. With the help
of graph theory, a method is proposed that automatically splits a complex line
topology with branches into several one-dimensional lines. The problem of
short-circuit fault location in the branching lines is then transformed into
several one-dimensional optimization problems, which are then solved by the
optimization algorithm. This solves the problem of realizing rapid location in
a power network with branches. Numerical experiments are carried out in a
distribution network model to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method.
Results under different conditions show the method works reliably and
efficiently.
