Wireless sensor network to help prevent power cuts

The EPSRC-funded team will develop a WSN capable of sensing partial discharge (PD) in electricity sub-stations, a situation that occurs when the insulation of cables and other power equipment becomes old or damaged.

Left unchecked, partial discharge can lead to dangerous and destructive faults including explosions and power cuts. Designed to be monitored centrally, the new WSN will allow operators to replace planned maintenance with condition-based maintenance.

Ian Glover, the new Professor of Radio Science and Wireless Systems Engineering at Huddersfield University told The Engineer via email that the traditional approach to PD detection using free-standing radio receivers has been to measure the difference in time-of-flight from the PD source to a set of spatially separated receivers. 

‘The difference in the times-of-flight are found by cross-correlating the noise-like time waveforms arriving at the different receivers with each other,’ he said. ‘The difference in the times-of-flight for a pair of receivers defines a locus of points on which the source of PD could lie. Multiple loci, resulting from multiple pairs of receivers, intersect which gives the location of the source.’