Underground Cable Fault Detection Using IOT

Abstract: The objective of this project is to determine the distance of underground cable fault from base station in kilo meters using an Arduino. The underground cable system is a common practice followed in many urban areas. An issue may happen in an underground cable just because of earth tremors or any burrowing procedure. Since the area of the issue happened is obscure it is very hard for the fixing procedure. This hindrance is handled with the assistance of optical fibre framework. A lot of optical strands is put alongside the force cables. While a fault occurs for some reason, at that time the repairing process related to that particular cable is difficult due to not knowing the exact location of the cable fault. The proposed system is to find the exact location of the fault. The project uses the standard concept of Ohms law i.e., when a low DC voltage is applied at the feeder end through a series resistor (Cable lines), then current would vary depending upon the location of fault in the cable. In case there is a short circuit (Line to Ground), the voltage across series resistors changes accordingly, which is then fed to inbuilt ADC of Arduino to develop precise digital data for display in kilometres. The project is assembled with a set of resistors representing the cable length in km and the fault creation is made by a set of switches at every known km to cross check the accuracy of the same. The fault occurring at a particular distance, the respective phase along with the distance is displayed on the LCD. The same information is also sent over IOT, interfaced to the Arduino. Further this project can be enhanced by using capacitor in an ac circuit to measure the impedance which can even locate the open circuited cable, unlike the short circuited fault only using resistors in DC circuit as followed in the above proposed project.