Electromagnetic and acoustic bimodality for the detection and localization of electrical arc faults

Abstract

Electrical arc faults pose an important problem to electrical installations worldwide, be it production facilities or distribution systems. In this context, it is easy to assess the economic repercussions of such a fault, when power supply is cut off downstream of its location, while also realizing that an early detection of the on-site smaller scale faults would be of great benefit. This articles serves as a review of the current state-of-the-art work that has been carried out on the subject of detection and localization of electrical arc faults, by exploiting the bimodality of this phenomenon, which generates simultaneously electromagnetic and acoustic waves, propagating in a free space path. En experimental setup has been defined, to demonstrate principles stated in previous works by the authors, and signal processing methods have been used in order to determine the DTOA (difference-of-time-of-arrival) of the acoustic signals, which allows localization of the transient fault. In the end there is a discussion regarding the results and further works, which aims to validate this approach in more real-life applications.