Online Detection and Location of Soft Faults in Wired-Power Networks

The past decade has witnessed an insane exponential upraise in research and development in different technological systems. This was accompanied by advanced complex electrical employments striving for more and more electrical energy. Accordingly, extended and wider power networks for energy transmission and distribution became necessary to cover this increasing demand. Unfortunately, power networks are confronted by natural and human-made disorders leading to the appearance of faults. In this paper, an approach based on the tenets of the time reversal concept is proposed. This approach, referred to as the on-line time reversal (OTR), benefits from the time reversibility of wave equations to refocus the time-reversed back-propagated electromagnetic waves onto the location of the fault. The main advantage of the OTR is its ability to test live transmission line networks without the need to disconnect the whole network from its infrastructure. In order to verify the feasibility of the proposed method in detecting faults and to evaluate its accuracy in localization, simulation and experimental based setups have been conducted targeting single and branched transmission line networks. The obtained results verify that the use of OTR leads to accurate detection and location of faults in different wiring configurations.