Advanced Techniques for Electrical Wire Fault

IAI will extend the work that we have doing in phase I and option period on Inductive Time Domain Reflectometry (ITDR), to detect and locate flaws in wiring systems. This approach merges two methods most commonly used for the inspection of conducting structures: TDR, and Eddy Current Testing (ECT). In many ways, TDR and ECT are orthogonal methods. By combining them, key advantages of both (testing at distance for TDR, and sensitivity for ECT) are retained while avoiding some of their limitations. The proposed TDR technology, which uses high speed digital signals for probing the wires, has the following improvements over state of the art: higher sensitivity to soft faults such as insulation chafing, and unambiguous localization of faults on branched wiring harnesses. The methodology of Inductive Time domain Reflectometry-ITDR (injecting signal in one wire and correlating it with reflections in the neighboring wire) has been very successful in detecting and locating faults (both hard and soft faults). Our Phase I experimental results demonstrate clearly that: (1) Induced measurements show far greater sensitivity to soft faults (insulation chafing). (2) Induced measurements can locate faults unequivocally in branched circuits by observing the reflections in adjacent wires.