Advanced Techniques for Electrical Wire Fault

LiveWire Test Labs, Inc., in cooperation with the Center of Excellence for Smart Sensors at the University of Utah is working towards the full development of "smart connectors" and smart circuit breakers that can locate faults on live wires in flight. These faults are typically too small to locate on the ground or any time other than when they are an intermittent open or short circuit. One of the important challenges of testing live power distribution systems is the branched network problem, which creates overlapping reflections. We have determined that it is critical to have multiple sensors working simultaneously in most power distribution systems to determine which branch a fault is located on. The sensors must communicate between each other to better pinpoint the fault on the network, and we will be developing this capability for the spread spectrum time domain reflectometry (SSTDR) system. Work that is proposed for this project includes: development of software to locate faults with information from multiple sensors, development of a directional feed system, and combining communication with the sensing signals. This enhances the SSTDR test systems' ability to locate latent faults before they cause system failure.