Experiment on the application of Bluetooth in vacuum switch cabinet

Under the trend of substation automation, the application of wireless technology to the data communication of power equipments has a wide prospect. Bluetooth is a mature and low-cost wireless technique which is widely applied for commercial use, however its application to power equipments such as vacuum switches which are now more and more used in medium voltage substations, still needs to develop. In this case, the research on the application of Bluetooth to monitor and control the vacuum switch cabinets is an attractive aspect. However, very few experiments have been carried out currently to assess the performance of Bluetooth communication under the harsh electromagnetic environment in vacuum switch cabinets, and carry on the reliability tests based on data communication demonstrator in practice. This paper designs and makes up a data communication demonstrator based on the Bluetooth Protocol with the chips of C8051F020 and ROK101008. The reliability tests on this demonstrator under a series of typical interferes in vacuum switch cabinets are carried out. These include reliability tests of 50 Hz magnetic field, corona discharge, air gap breakdown and vacuum gap breakdown. Parallel experiments on the data communication demonstrators without EMI are also conducted for comparison. The features of the Bluetooth communication under typical interferes in vacuum switch cabinets are provided, and the results of the experiments are discussed in detail. They have shown that it is feasible to use the Bluetooth communication technology to monitor and control the vacuum switch cabinets.