Electrical tagging devices for the removal of fault location ambiguities by reflectometry in complex electrical networks

Florent Loete (1) , Michel Sorine (2)

1 GeePs - Laboratoire Génie électrique et électronique de Paris
2 SISYPHE - SIgnals and SYstems in PHysiology & Engineering

In general, data from a single reflectometer are insufficient to locate defects in wires beyond a branching point. Knowing the distance to the defect, some additional information is required for selecting the faulty wire among possible candidates. This paper presents an innovative method of electrical tagging of wires to get uniqueness of fault location. It presents the tagging devices that may be used instead of additional reflectometers as in the expensive and complex distributed reflectometry techniques. Inexpensive electrical “tags” can be purposely designed with specific frequency signatures using only a few passive components. Preliminary experimental results show how their insertion on the branches of a network can give a proper identity to each one of them without affecting the useful signal frequency band. It is shown how each echo of the time domain impulse response of the line keeps a memory of the branches it has travelled along, thus cancelling its source location ambiguity.

Keywords: Time-domain reflectometry; complex network; distributed system; online wire diagnosis; wire fault detection ambiguity

Domains: Electromagnetism

Florent Loete, Michel Sorine. Electrical tagging devices for the removal of fault location ambiguities by reflectometry in complex electrical networks. IEEE SENSORS, Oct 2016, Orlando, FL, United States. ⟨10.1109/ICSENS.2016.7808646⟩. ⟨hal-01943914⟩