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Passive monitoring technique that directly measures the electrical and thermal behaviour of power cables at weak points unseen by DTS, DAS, or visual inspections.
About
Synaptec developed the world’s first passive Distributed Electrical Sensing (DES). One of its applications is pre-emptive monitoring of AC cable assets and fault protection in cable-line circuits. Compared to other existing techniques DES detects more failure modes, earlier, and in more locations. Specifically, DES passively monitors screen currents, phase currents and temperatures at all joints and terminations to detect subtle asset damage synchronously, over wide area. These failure-prone components account for almost 70% of all failures in cable systems and are overlooked by optical temperature and acoustic sensing technologies.
DES uses zero-maintenance passive photonic converters which connect by light via existing optical fibre and don’t need power, telecoms, and data networks to operate. DES sensors detect electrical & mechanical precursors of failures, not their effects, thus help to de-risk cable assets and enable early intervention to mitigate damage, reduce risk and outage costs.
The sensors are retrofittable and can integrate with other optical monitoring technologies like DTS or DAS. Additionally, DES can handle post-event protection response to a cable fault by enabling selective auto-reclose of faulted sections in mixed circuits.
Key Benefits
DES provides a simple, practical, and cost-effective method to continuously monitor damage and degradation to power cables, joints, and terminations.
Measures a comprehensive set of mechanical, thermal, and electrical stresses and monitors key metrics that determine cable health and remaining life.
Continuous online monitoring by DES is highly complementary to reliable ‘baseline’ offline tests such as PD or tan δ and provides additional benefits:
- Earlier warning of more cable failure modes compared to conventional technologies
- Elimination of periodic manual inspections through automation
- Optimisation of scheduled maintenance by focusing efforts on high-risk locations
- Retrofit on existing cable assets
- Generation of unique new data sets for better asset management decisions
Applications
The energy transition is challenging the power industry to accommodate new paradigms of flexible supply and demand, without reducing reliability or increasing costs. Scaling up real-time visibility and control is needed to manage this change reliably and economically, and this requires a new approach to power system instrumentation. At Synaptec, we have responded to this challenge by developing our Distributed Electrical Sensing (DES) technology, a completely passive solution that requires no control power, data networks or expensive civil works at the point of measurement, which can be interrogated over long distances, and is highly secure. This enables affordable, resilient, and granular instrumentation of remote, hard-to-reach circuits and assets, providing a powerful platform for wide-area synchronous measurements throughout power networks.
Sectors we support:
Power grids: We offer advanced instrumentation solutions to our customers, enabling automated condition monitoring and wide-area protection and control.
Renewables: We provide automated condition monitoring of critical generation assets to reduce outages, maximise availability, and improve safety.
Industrial: Our technology enables condition-based maintenance of complex and remote electrical infrastructure in private power networks such as railways.