Design and Testing of a Non-contact Medium Voltage Detector for Field Maintenance Vehicles

Electric distribution network repair, maintenance and operation services predominantly require technical staff activities inside the live working zone, under high voltage. The current practices mainly based on use of voltage detectors that require physical contact with the overhead lines to detect the presence of the voltage include inherent risk of encountering vital accidents due to wrong use of the insulated handle, while the voltage detection visual and sound warning of recently used non-contact voltage detectors could be ignored by the field crew. The field personnel may have a wrong assumption of false warning due to interfering electric fields by the nearby transmission overhead lines or other distribution circuitry. Therefore, the current solutions are still not able to prevent high number of accidents that happen annually in the field. A more advanced and secure approach could be direct integration of non-contact voltage detector into the bucket-working platform control system of the field vehicle. This work presents the first design, simulation and laboratory prototype testing activities of a non-contact medium voltage detector that is planned to be integrated into the bucket control mechanism of the field vehicles of distribution network operators.