Power Line Environment Research Articles

An Improved YOLOv8-Based Foreign Detection Algorithm for Transmission Lines

This research aims to overcome three major challenges in foreign object detection on power transmission lines: data scarcity, background noise, and high computational costs. In the improved YOLOv8 algorithm, the newly introduced lightweight GSCDown (Ghost Shuffle Channel Downsampling) module effectively captures subtle image features by combining 1 × 1 convolution and GSConv technology, thereby enhancing detection accuracy. CSPBlock (Cross-Stage Partial Block) fusion enhances the model’s accuracy and stability by strengthening feature expression and spatial perception while maintaining the algorithm’s lightweight nature and effectively mitigating the issue of vanishing gradients, making it suitable for efficient foreign object detection in complex power line environments. Additionally, PAM (pooling attention mechanism) effectively distinguishes between background and target without adding extra parameters, maintaining high accuracy even in the presence of background noise. Furthermore, AIGC (AI-generated content) technology is leveraged to produce high-quality images for training data augmentation, and lossless feature distillation ensures higher detection accuracy and reduces false positives. In conclusion, the improved architecture reduces the parameter count by 18% while improving the mAP@0.5 metric by a margin of 5.5 points when compared to YOLOv8n. Compared to state-of-the-art real-time object detection frameworks, our research demonstrates significant advantages in both model accuracy and parameter size.

Evaluation on the method of restoring the complex communication environment in the field based on the complex low pressure platform simulation platform

Abstract In recent years, with the development of smart grids, people have increasingly high requirements for the safety, stability, and reliability of smart grid operation. In actual operation, smart grids require real-time monitoring and control, while for low-voltage power lines, power line carrier communication is required for data transmission. However, in practical applications on site, the low-voltage power line environment is complex, with ground faults, electrical equipment interference, and other situations that can affect communication quality and reliability, leading to a decrease in the effectiveness of real-time monitoring and control. The research in this paper is based on a complex low voltage platform simulation platform to restore the on-site complex substation communication environment. The purpose is to improve the efficiency of automatic meter reading systems by using various communication methods in low-voltage substations, such as wireless public network point-to-point data transmission, optical fiber communication data transmission, power line carrier data transmission, etc. Automatic meter reading systems are an important means of low voltage substation communication. This article experimentally tested the maximum personnel allocation for meter reading using low voltage carrier communication technology, which was 8 people smaller than the maximum personnel allocation for traditional meter reading, and the minimum personnel allocation was 8 people smaller than the traditional meter reading personnel allocation. The electricity accuracy of meter reading using low voltage carrier communication was up to 96 %, while the electricity accuracy of traditional meter reading was 70 %. The maximum accuracy of line loss statistics for low voltage carrier communication technology meter reading was 90 %, while the maximum accuracy of line loss statistics for traditional meter reading was 68 %. The frequency of load anomalies found in low-voltage carrier communication meter readings within a month ranged from 30 to 60 times, while the traditional meter readings concentrated on 10–25 times. From these data, it is clear that communication meter reading in low-voltage station areas has advantages over traditional meter reading.

Autonomous power line detection and tracking system using UAVs

A large portion of overhead power transmission infrastructure around the world is becoming aged, raising the demand for frequent grid inspections in an efficient, cost-effective manner in order to keep it functional. Drones are a promising solution for infrastructure inspection, however, they require further investigation and development to enable their autonomy for large scale inspection operations.This paper proposes a drone framework based on open-source platforms for autonomous inspection of electrical grid infrastructure. The framework incorporates (1) a cloud service for geo-location data of nearby power pylons; (2) a localisation system for pylon navigation and cable grasping; and (3) a cable following algorithm for cable inspection using onboard sensors. The software functionality of the proposed framework has been validated in a simulation power line environment. Custom drones have been developed for validating the framework and algorithms within an unenergised power line environment.

Vision-Based Power Line Segmentation With an Attention Fusion Network

Automatic power transmission line detection plays the key role in smart grid which has been widely applied into the path planning and navigation of intelligent inspection platforms, such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), climbing robots, hybrid inspection robots, etc. Nevertheless, the power lines are always against complex background environment and different illumination conditions. And the power lines occupy a minimal portion image pixels in the aerial images compared with backgrounds which causes the foreground-background class imbalance issue. Therefore, robust and accurate vision-based power line detection still faces a certain challenge. Recently, deep learning has got fast development on pixel-level object segmentation due to strong contextual feature expression ability, especially U-shape network (U-Net) and its variants. However, it still exists a certain shortcomings owing to insufficient process of local contextual features to affect the segmentation precision. Meanwhile, multiple pooling operations in deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) also will cause the information loss. To address these issues, with the encoder-decoder architecture, a novel vision-based power line detection network is proposed in this paper to construct an end-to-end detection scheme of power lines from aerial images. To make the segmentation network capture the global contexts and emphasize target regions of power transmission lines, an attention block is proposed to be embedded into the proposed power line detection network to address the class imbalance issue. Meanwhile, faced with the insufficient process of local contextual feature maps of DCNNs, an attention fusion block is proposed for multi-scale feature fusion to acquire more rich information and improve the segmentation precision. Experiments on power lines show that the proposed power line detection network shows a good segmentation performance on real power line environment compared with other advanced detection methods.

Onboard Powerline Perception System for UAVs Using mmWave Radar and FPGA-Accelerated Vision

Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) interactions with powerlines, such as close-up inspections for fault detection or grasping and landing for recharging, require advanced onboard perception capabilities. To solve such tasks, the UAV must be equipped with perception abilities that allow it to navigate between powerlines and safely approach specific cables of interest. A perception system with such capabilities requires state-of-the-art sensor technologies and data processing while still being subject to the limited hardware and energy resources of the UAV. In this paper, we present an advanced embedded system based on the cutting-edge Multiprocessing System-on-Chip (MPSoC) for onboard UAV powerline perception. Our platform consists of a mmWave radar and an RGB camera with data processing carried out on the MPSoC, covering both CPU and Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) computations. Following hardware-software co-design methodology, the heavy image processing tasks are accelerated in the FPGA and fused with computationally light mmWave data on the CPU, facilitating pose-estimation of the power lines. Utilizing the open-source autonomy frameworks PX4 and ROS2, we demonstrate integration of the system with onboard path planning based on the estimated cable positions. The robustness of the detection and pose-estimation methods have been demonstrated in several tests performed both in simulated and real-world powerline environments. The results show that our proposed perception system allows the UAV to safely navigate in close proximity to powerlines, by perceiving more individual cables at longer distances compared to previous work, while remaining lightweight, power-efficient, and low-cost.

Reduction of the Environmental Impact of Electric Field Generated by High Voltage Power Transmission Lines

The growing interest in the negative environmental impact of overhead power lines of high and extra-high voltage stems from the increasing ecological awareness of societies. Consequently, a number of respective legal restrictions have been issued and actions have been undertaken to reduce this impact, especially in the electric field of the power frequency. The aim of this paper is to analyze the possibilities of reducing the width of electric field influence zones by changing the design parameters of power lines and defining the spatial distribution of its conductors. This analysis was carried out using the developed and experimentally verified models for determining the electric field and audible noise in the power line environment. The computational models were used to analyze the width of the electric field influence zones of 400 kV lines and the noise levels at the borders of these zones. The research focused on single and double circuit 400 kV power lines. It was revealed that a reduction in electric field emissions is accompanied by an increase in noise emission. However, the analyses confirmed that the width of the electric field influence zones can be significantly reduced if the most important design and construction parameters of the line are properly selected. The obtained conclusions are valid not only for 400 kV lines, but also set directions to follow when changing the parameters of high voltage transmission lines of other rated voltages (above 100 kV).

Power Line Communication Simulation Considering Cyclostationary Noise for Metering Systems

In this paper, a comprehensive power line test bed for the automatic meter reading (AMR) system is developed. Such a test bed builds a 220[Formula: see text]V power line environment in which the intensity and types of simulated noise can be configured very flexibly. It facilitates the fast analysis of the running condition of AMR system and power line carrier communication (PLCC). In particular, a new simulation technique, which is dedicated to modeling the power line cyclostationary noise, is proposed in this paper through analyzing many unique power line noise characteristics. It is further integrated with a noise simulator which handles the controllable noise replayer and time-varying loads to make the whole simulation system more salient. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed simulator is highly effective. Our simulator can handle the communication tests with a wide frequency range, from 10[Formula: see text]kHz to 500[Formula: see text]kHz with high accuracy.

Demonstrative DC Motor Control under Power Communication Network

Power line communication (PLC) has been used to transmit and receive digital data via power line in wide application. However, power lines weren’t built for data transmission originally. In practice, data transmission is commonly subjected to switching noise by the multi-path effect. The objective of this research is to establish a platform for easily tune the controller for motor control system under the PLC environment. We build up a dynamic model to simulate the power line environment for communication and propose a frequency-shift keying (FSK) technique to modulate and demodulate the signal for the purpose of network control in the disturbed feedback control loop. A modified proportional-integralderivative controller (PID controller) on positioning control a DC servo motor is proposed to against noise corruption while achieving tracking performance.

Cooperative Relaying in Power Line Environment: A Survey and Tutorial

Exchange of information is essential in any society and the demand for faster, cheaper, and secure communications is increasing every day. With other hi-tech initiatives like IPv6 and Internet-of-Things (IOT) already in the horizon, demand for broadband is set to escalate beyond its current level. Inherently laden in the challenges posed by this technology are fresh opportunities in terms of penetration of data services into rural communities and development of innovative strategies for more efficient use of the grid. Though still in its developmental phase/stage, Power Line Communication (PLC) has grown beyond theoretical fantasy to become a reality. The proofs are the readily available PLC systems that can be purchased off the shelfto achieve in-house networking and the much talked about, smart metering technology; generally regarded as the “new bride” in utilities industry. One of the biggest gains of PLC is its use of existing electrical cables, thereby eliminating cost of installation and maintenance of data cables. However, given that the power infrastructure was traditionally built to deliver electricity, data signals do suffer various forms of distortions and impairments as they transit it. This paper presents a tutorial on the deployed wireless system technique which is to be adapted to PLC scenario for the purpose of managing the available source energy for achieving reliable communication system. One of these techniques is the cooperative diversity. Its application and deployment in power line environment is explored. The improvement achieved through cooperative diversity in some PLC systems were presented along with the associated limitations. Finally, future areas of research which will further improve the reliability of PLC systems and reduce its power consumption during transmission is shown

Performance evaluation of two narrowband PLC systems: PRIME and G3

The present work analyzes and compares two popular standards for data transmission over power line networks: PRIME and G3.A complete and detailed description of both standards is presented together with simulation results of their performance in a power line environment. In order to create an accurate analogy of the transmission channel, background and asynchronous impulsive noises are included using previous results from literature. Simulation results show how PRIME and G3 behave in several noisy environments.Finally, with respect to PRIME, a proposal is made to increase its performance in a hardly impulsive noise channel.

Applications of momentary Fourier transform in frequency shift keying signal demodulation

SUMMARYPower line communication is attracting increasing attention for its characteristics of easy availability and low cost. Frequency shift keying with the virtue of antijamming capability is suitable for the low signal‐to‐noise ratio power line environment. The principle of the frequency shift keying communication system based on momentary Fourier transform (MFT) algorithm is provided first in this paper. Theoretically, the twiddle factor in the MFT algorithm is a decimal with infinite length. However, when it is applied on digital signal processor (DSP), the registers with finite length in DSP lead to the inaccuracy of the twiddle factor. Thus, the MFT algorithm with recursive form will cause accumulative error as a result. We analyze the impact of the inaccurate twiddle factor on the MFT algorithm from a novel point of view, by which the MFT algorithm is considered as a linear time invariant system. We prove that the accumulative error would not disperse when the modulus of the twiddle factor is smaller than 1. Simulation results show that the truncation approach is more effective than both carrying and rounding methods in a practical system. In addition, the number of significant digits of truncated twiddle factor must be chosen larger than 4 to overcome the problem of accumulative error.Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

High-Voltage-Environment Backscatter-Channel Measurements at 5.8 GHz

This study characterizes 5.8 GHz backscatter radio links in a transient, high-voltage power line environment. The measured results demonstrate how an increased RF carrier frequency provides additional resistance to the noise, interference, and added corona shielding of communication antennas that operate near high-voltage lines. The results lead to important design rules for low-power wireless-sensor applications deployed in the future smart grid.

Adaptive Channel State Routing for Home Network Systems Using Power Line Communications

In this paper, an adaptive channel state routing (ACSR) algorithm is proposed for home network systems based on power line communications (PLCs). The ACSR uses two metrics of channel state indicator (CSI) and distance to detect the state of a power line channel dynamically changed due to harsh power line environments with unstable and asymmetric paths. For decreasing network traffic, the ACSR provides each node with a probabilistic flooding method according to the number of neighboring nodes. For the performance evaluation of the A CSR, a test-bed that includes PLC modems with the ACSR is set up in a noisy environment. Experimental results show the feasibility of the ACSR algorithm.

Noise Analysis of Power-Line Communications Using Spread-Spectrum Modulation

Ergodic chaotic parameter modulation (ECPM), based on a spreading chaotic dynamic system, has shown promise for power-line communications (PLC) due to its simplicity in receiver design. Alternatively, direct sequence spread-spectrum modulation is known for its strengths in its resistance to multipath fading and some inherent narrowband interference suppression capability and thus is a logical choice for the difficult power-line environment. Previous work has evaluated the general analytical solution for the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for these techniques assuming an idealized implementation. This study provides a more detailed evaluation of the SNR as a function of gain factor, individual noise components and other issues that could reduce the overall effectiveness of the PLC technique. Improvements in symbol error probability with an increase in respective gain factors for various SNR conditions are shown. This study facilitates a direct SNR comparison of two modern PLC techniques in a noise-limited channel not previously performed.

Effective Communication Strategies for Noise-Limited Power-Line Channels

Ergodic chaotic parameter modulation (ECPM) has recently been proposed as a viable modulation technique for power-line communications (PLC) due to its robustness to multipath conditions and low complexity in receiver design. While performance of ECPM has been found to be satisfactory in limited noise conditions, performance issues for other hostile challenges in the power-line environment, such as narrowband and impulsive noise, have not been extensively studied for this technique. Numerous studies have been performed on direct-sequence spread-spectrum (DSSS) modulation used in a wireless channel. The technique has been found to be well suited for a mobile environment due to its resistance to multipath fading and inherent narrowband interference suppression capability. For this study, PLC performance is investigated for both the DSSS and ECPM receiver for PLC. A signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) analysis is presented which investigates the noise-limiting properties of the power-line channel. This work provides a detailed insight to communication system performance in a power-line environment that includes the presence of significant narrowband and impulsive noise. It is concluded that while DSSS significantly outperforms ECPM in terms of bit-error rate for a Gaussian white noise-limited channel, the performance of the two techniques is similar for low SNR communication dominated by narrowband or impulsive noise. While the implementation of DSSS is more complex, ECPM is found to be less robust to low-frequency interference

Performance of Space-Time Block Coding in Powerline and Satellite Communications

In this paper Space-Time Block Coding (STBC) is examined in powerline and satellite communications, comparing the gains that this coding-modulation technique provides to these communications systems. The powerline environment is assumed to be a frequency-selective, multipath fading environment with Additive White Class A Noise (AWCN), which is used to model the actual powerline noise characteristics. The satellite channel for urban area, modeled as a combination of Rayleigh and log-normal processes with the presence of Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) is also studied. System efficiency is enhanced by the application of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), convolutional coding and block interleaving and the performance of different Phase Shift Keying (PSK) modulation schemes under the imposed channel conditions is investigated. The performance of the system is assessed by the commonly used Bit Error Rate (BER) vs. Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) diagrams and there is also a comparison regarding the throughput efficiency among the examined systems. As stated in the results section, STBC can be used in powerline and satellite communications providing remarkable results, comparable to those in terrestrial wireless communications where STBC is nowadays a rather mature technique

An analog spread-spectrum interface for power-line data communication in home networking

Communication using power line as a medium of signal transmission offers a convenient and inexpensive solution for multimedia signal transmission and control applications in smart home networking. This work presents a novel analog spread-spectrum (SS) scheme for physical-layer interface in home networking. The proposed communication scheme uses a chaotic system to modulate the information signal for wideband transmission. The wideband spectral property of the transmitted chaotic signal adds robustness to the proposed scheme against the hostile power-line environment that is characterized by non-Gaussian noise and multipath propagation. By exploiting the ergodic property of chaotic signals, a simple noncoherent receiver is developed here. Not only does the proposed analog scheme demonstrate satisfactory communication performance, but it can also be implemented with simple hardware and low manufacturing cost, which is an important consideration for cost-effective home networking. The proposed noncoherent SS system does not involve quantization and complex synchronization process and, hence, it is more efficient in transmitting analog multimedia signals compared to the conventional SS system. Performance analyses illustrate the superior communication performance of the proposed analog SS system over the conventional SS scheme for multimedia signal transmission in a power-line home networking environment.

Multipath Characterization of Indoor Power-Line Networks

The time- and frequency-varying behavior of an indoor power-line network is the result of variable impedance loads connected to its termination points. In fact, any signal transmitted through such a communications network is subject to time-varying multipath fading. In this paper, an analytical calculation method is presented, which can be used to determine the multipath components of any point-to-point channel in the indoor power-line environment. The method calculates all transmission characteristics of the network and, therefore, it can be exploited in the process of designing proper transmission algorithms for optimizing system performance. The proposed method is applied to an example network to demonstrate its usefulness in explaining the network's time-dependent behavior and in estimating channel parameters, such as subchannel bandwidth, multipath delay spread, fading conditions, etc.

Development of a test bed for power line communications

This paper presents the development of a power line test bed which provides a platform to simulate the 230 V/50 Hz power line environment in a controlled and reproducible engineering manner. The target is to communicate data over power lines in the frequency range from 1 MHz to 10 MHz. This test bed is integrated with power line communication (PLC) channel model, loads and impairment devices for worst-case environment simulation. Besides, the methods for coupling and isolating the high frequency signals from one section to another section are discussed. These methods are important for realizing the test bed as the noise immunity, channel impedance controllability, and high frequency communication signal coupling and isolation capabilities are essential.

Transmission on indoor power lines: from a stochastic channel model to the optimization and performance evaluation of multicarrier systems

AbstractThis paper deals with optimization and performance evaluation of multicarrier transmissions on indoor power lines, taking the actual channel characteristics into account. From intensive measurements of noise on lines, the most significant parameters of impulsive noise were defined and classified, and then a statistical study was carried out. The other types of noise, i.e. narrow band and coloured noise have also been characterized. In like manner, the transfer functions between two points of a power line network have been measured. From all these data, a stochastic channel model representative of the environment is built and implemented in a software tool simulating the link. Various transmission schemes have been considered to mitigate the effects on one hand of the stationary noise, the channel frequency selectivity and of the change of its state, and on the other, on the impulsive noise. These techniques are optimized for the indoor power line environment and their performances, expressed in terms of bit error rate, are compared. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.