Abstract:With the further development of transformation for urban power grid,power cables are more and more widely used. Once the power cable fails,it will seriously endanger the safety of power grid and people's property. The external destruction is the most important factor of cable faults. The EMTP - ATP electromagnetic transient simulation software is adopted to establish the models of different cable fault. The propagation characteristics of traveling wave with different frequency in the cable are studied,and the propagation characteristics of traveling wave in the cable connectors under different faults are analyzed. The results show that the proposed method can effectively detect the location of external destruction for power cable.