Valve short-circuit protection acts as the primary protection for high voltage direct current converters.There are two types of valve short-circuit protections,and only the first one can discriminate the grounding faults in the converter.However, the performance of this type is uncertain in some fixed fault case,while under other different fault cases,the protection performance may be similar.The first type of valve short-circuit protection performance under the grounding faults is analyzed in detail by using MATLAB simulation.According to the simulation results under the same fault case,a method for dividing fault stages is proposed to confirm protection performance.Meanwhile,because of the similarity of the protection performance during different grounding faults,a method of distinguishing different faults is developed.Based on above two methods,a novel method for fault location in the converter is proposed.