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Abstract—Occurrences of underground cable faults in the sophisticated equipment and to finally pinpoint the fault is a
power transmission and distribution system is unavoidable time consuming task. Therefore, design and construction of a
due to several reasons. Long outage of power supply can light weight portable machine would make the detection the
cause the power distributors and retailers heavy loss of cable faults and pinpointing the fault location task easier and
revenue and discomfort of the customers. Therefore, a faster for the field engineers.
quick detection and rectification of the faults is a major
This paper reviews the a number cable fault locating
concern of the power distributors and retailers. This paper
techniques which are in currently in practice and a number of
reviews a number of high voltage cable fault locating
state-of-the-art techniques based on highly computational
techniques that are currently in practice and a number of
methods proposed by the research community. The paper also
state-of-the-art techniques based on highly computational
presents some guideline for the design process of a compact
methods proposed by the research community. The paper
and lightweight high voltage fault locating machines that can
also presents some guideline for the design process of a
make the fault locating task easier and faster.
compact and lightweight high voltage fault locating
machines that can make the fault locating task easier and II. TYPES OF FAULT DETECTION
faster.
The faults occurring in the power lines and cables can be
Keywords - power cable; fault detection; time domain classified into four main categories - short circuit to another
reflectometry; conductor in the cable, short circuit to earth, high resistance to
earth and open circuit. Not all approaches work best for each
I. INTRODUCTION type of fault. Four methods that are mostly used in detecting
Detecting cable and overhead line fault and pinpointing the fault location are described as follows.
location of fault is a specialized area of electrical technology.
• A-Frame
The performance of efficient fault location greatly depends on
engineering skills and knowledge. Power distributors always • Thumper
deploy highly skilled engineers and available sophisticated
machines for the fault locating task. • Time Domain Reflectometer (TDR)
Therefore, the low voltage TDR and the thumper methods can
be integrated to a single system where a low voltage TDR
pulse is taken of the cable under test and stored in a display
memory. Then the thumper can be used to send a high voltage
pulse for burning the faulty point. While the arc is burning at
Figure 2: A Thumper method of detection cable fault location [5]. the faulty point, the TDR can be used to send the same low
voltage pulse and new pulse will be superimposed upon the from the other known resistor values using the following
first trace. The arc is a low impedance point that results in the equation.
TDR pulse to reflect as it would with a short circuit.
. (1)
Figure 4 shows an example of the test with two traces of the
signals one on the top of another. In the figure, the dashed Figure 7 shows a Murray bridge loop for cable fault location.
cursor represents the launching point and solid cursor shows Besides the faulty conductor, one healthy conductor is
the faulty point. From these two cursors, the machine can required as connected to terminal T1 in the measuring circuit.
directly calculate the distance of the fault. This integrated External loop wires in the circuit, connecting the resistances at
Thumper and TDR method reduces the major insulation the front and the conductors at the cable end, should have
damage of the cable but does not discard the risk. close to zero resistance.
TDR method is useful for open circuit fault detection. Figure 4
shows a clear picture how the TDR method would response in
case of open circuit conductor. Again if it has a low series
resistance at the fault the problem will be similar as high
resistance earth fault.
, (2)
where .
D. Bridge Method
Fault distances can be calculated from the resistor values using
Bridge methods used for locating faults in underground cables
the conductor resistance per unit length of cable.
are based on modified Wheatstone circuit where direct current
is used to measure the resistance in order to calculate distance Glaser measuring circuit for cable fault location is shown in
of the fault in percentage of the total line length. Murray and Figure 8. In this measurement circuit, two healthy conductors
Glaser bridges [7] use the use similar principles for calculating (L1 and L2) of the cable with same diameter and material are
the distance of the fault. Brief descriptions of these bridges are required beside the faulty conductor (L3) as shown in Figure 7.
given as follows.
R1 R2
I1 I2
V D B
G
Ix I3
Figure 8: Glaser measuring circuit.
Rx R3