Failure prediction in power system components

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Despite recent advances in power system protection technologies over the last decade, existing protectiverelays still operate only after a fault disrupts the healthy operation of a power system component. Therefore, theprotection technology has remained reactive in nature. This approach has a limit for reducing the outage timeand increasing the reliability of the grid. This project through a partnership between Professor Ali Hooshyarand partner organization, Hyperion Sensors, will attempt to fundamentally change this approach and developprotection technologies that predict a future failure in a power system component, e.g., an underground cable ora transformer winding. Therefore, the necessary maintenance to remove the root cause of that fault can becarried out before the end users experience power outage. The technique adopted by Hyperion Sensors toimplement this approach is based on distributed measurement of mechanical quantities (such as, temperatureand pressure) using a network of optical fibre. The optical fibre is distributed spatially alongside different partsof the power equipment, and operates both as the sensor and the communication medium to transfer themeasured quantities. The optical fibre can measure, e.g., temperature through a variety of principles, such asBrillouin principle.The challenges that are to be met for the realization of this technology are (i) identifying the appropriatemechanical quantity measured by the optical fibre, and (ii) finding the patterns in the measured quantities thatcan be used to predict a future failure. Hyperion Sensors is acquiring its first set of temperature measurementsfor an underground cable. The company will provide the data to the applicant to investigate differentwaveshape recognition and artificial intelligence techniques that can be used to address the above challenges.These techniques will be implemented in the protective device developed by Hyperion Sensors. Such aprotective device will reduce the outage time and increase the reliability of the power grid.