Visual live-line condition monitoring of composite insulators
- Resource Type
- Conference
- Authors
- Veerappan, Chithambaram A.; Green, Peter R.; Rowland, Simon M.
- Source
- 2010 1st International Conference on Applied Robotics for the Power Industry Applied Robotics for the Power Industry (CARPI), 2010 1st International Conference on. :1-6 Oct, 2010
- Subject
- Power, Energy and Industry Applications
Nuclear Engineering
Geoscience
Robotics and Control Systems
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Insulators
Cameras
Wireless LAN
Robot vision systems
Wireless communication
Power transmission lines
Mobile robotics
Field robotics
Vision
Design
Prototype
Implementation
Inspection
- Language
Today's society has an ever increasing demand for electrical energy. The UK's core electrical infrastructure is approximately 60 years old and is reaching the end of its originally intended lifespan. However it is not economically viable to completely replace aging components; a better solution being to actively monitor infrastructure components and perform maintenance as required. This paper focuses on the monitoring of transmission line insulators. It reports on the initial stages of the development of a system for visually inspecting exposed surfaces of composite insulators under live-line conditions, whilst mounted to the insulator itself. Various image capture mechanisms are discussed and detail is provided on chosen solution. Data transmission experimentation is presented from the viewpoint of ASCII data, which can be subsequently replaced with digital images. Results presented indicate that a moderate wireless communication channel is perfectly viable under high field strength conditions and indicate no reason why higher bandwidth communication mechanisms should not also function effectively.