Laboratory Setup for Fault Detection on Overhead Power Lines Based on Magnetic Field Measurement

This paper presents a laboratory setup for testing and experimental verification of fault detection methods based on contactless measurement of power line magnetic field. The setup consists of a physical power line model scaled to laboratory conditions with two orthogonal measuring coils installed on one support pole underneath phase conductors. Voltages induced in the coils are amplified and filtered out by using analog electrical circuits and are fed to a digital data acquisition board. The sampled voltages are digitally processed by employing a generalized fault detection method previously developed by the authors. In this paper the main steps for designing the measuring coils, analog amplifying and filtering circuits are described in detail. The developed laboratory setup is verified by experiments for different shunt and series faults.