Identification of underground cable fault location and development

Abstract

As India emerging as a developing country, civilized area is also increasing day by day. As underground cables are best under such conditions its utilization is also growing because of its obvious advantages like lower transmission losses, lower maintenance cost and they are less susceptible to the impacts of severe weather and so many. But it is having few disadvantages too like expensive installation and detection of fault location. As it is not visible it becomes difficult to find exact location of the fault. In this paper we present two methods which will be very useful to identify the exact distance of fault of underground system from base station. One of the methods is Murray loop method and other one is Ohm's Law Method. Murray loop method uses the whetstone bridge to calculate exact distance of fault location from base station and sends it to the user mobile. Whereas in Ohm's law method, when any fault occurs, voltage drop will vary depending on the length of fault in cable, since the current varies. Both the methods use voltage convertor, microcontroller and potentiometer to find the fault location under LG, LL, LLL faults.