Underground Cable Fault Detection Using Arduino
Abstract
The objective of this paper is to determine the location of fault in underground cable lines from the source station to exact location of fault in any units, here in kilometers. Whenever a fault occurs in the underground cable line for some reason, the repairing process relating to that faulted cable becomes difficult owing to lack of proper system for tracking the exact fault location and the type of fault occurred in the cable. For this, a system has to be developed to find the exact location of the fault in the distribution line system for all the three phases R, Y & B for different type of situations of faults. Here in this paper single line to ground, double line to ground & three phase faults have been considered. Here a system is developed which consists of a microcontroller, LCD display, Fault Sensing Circuit Module and proper power supply arrangement with regulated power output. Hence, if there is a short circuit in the form of line to ground in any phase/phases, the voltage across series resistors changes accordingly and an analog signal in the form of voltage drop is generated by the fault sensing circuit of the introduced system, which is then fed to an ADC inbuilt in already programmed microcontroller to create the exact digital data and after processing the data the output will be displayed in the connected LCD with the exact location of fault occurred in kilometers from the source station and simultaneously also indicate the corresponding R, Y, B phase where fault occurred with the exact distance. In this system, AT mega 328P micro controller is used. Here the current sensing of circuits made with a combination of resistors is interfaced to ATmega328 micro controller with the help of internally inbuilt ADC for providing the digital data to microcontroller. The fault sensing circuit is made with the combination of set of series resistors and the set of switches alongside each resistor. The relays are controlled by the relay driver. A 16x2 LCD display is connected to the microcontroller to display the information of phase/phases and location of fault in kilometers.
