In this paper, automatic fault diagnosis in large scale power networks described by second-order nonlinear swing equations is studied. This work focuses on a class of faults that occur in the transmission lines. Transmission line protection is an important issue in power system engineering because a large portion of power system faults is occurring in transmission lines. This paper presents a novel technique to detect, isolate and identify the faults on transmissions using only a small number

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... observations. We formulate the problem of fault diagnosis of nonlinear power network into a compressive sensing framework and derive an optimisationbased formulation of the fault identification problem. An iterative reweighted 1-minimisation algorithm is finally derived to solve the detection problem efficiently. Under the proposed framework, a real-time fault monitoring scheme can be built using only measurements of phase angles of nonlinear power networks.