Multivariable Geometric Laplace Transform and Fault Detection in Distributed-Converter Lines

Abstract

Monitoring a DC line with many distributed power converters is a genuinely spatio-temporal problem: the information about a localized fault travels along the whole conductor and reaches a few measurement points mixed with the dynamics of the line itself. This paper develops a two-dimensional geometric Laplace transform (t,x) -> (s_t,s_x) over a commutative subalgebra of the geometric algebra Cl(4,0), isomorphic to Segre's bicomplex numbers, in which two bivectors B_t and B_x act as independent imaginary units for the temporal and the spatial phase. Because the two phases live in algebraically distinguishable planes, a fault at position x_f leaves a transformed residual that factorizes as F_f(s_t) e^{-s_x x_f}: its temporal nature stays in the first factor and its location can be read as a geometric argument of the second. On this representation we build a transmission-line model of the converter line and its space-time dispersion relation, a distributed control by admittance shaping, including an exact treatment of discrete converter sites (spatial sampling, aliasing, and a per-converter droop realization that is exact on the sub-Nyquist band), and a fault diagnosis chain that detects, localizes and classifies injection-loss, shunt, sensor and local-controller faults, extends to multiple simultaneous faults with automatic order selection, and distinguishes the outage of a plant from a cable defect. As an integral object the transform is known in bicomplex analysis, and with a single independent variable it reduces to the complex Laplace transform; the contribution lies in its geometric embedding and in its operational use for fault diagnosis in distributed-converter networks. All results are reproduced by an accompanying open implementation.