International Journal of Electronics, Electrical and Computational System

IJEECS
ISSN 2348-117X
Volume 5, Issue 5
May 2016

Underground Cable Fault Detector Using Arduino

Preeti Jaidka Shreeya Srivastava Sonal Srivastava Shiv Pratap Raghuvanshi

JSS Academy of JSS Academy of JSS Academy of JSS Academy of
Technical Technical Technical Technical
Education,Noida Education,Noida Education,Noida Education,Noida

ABSTRACT trimming costs, less storm damage and reduced loss

This paper proposes underground fault location model
of day-to-day electricity sales when customers lose
using arduino. Underground distribution cables faces power after storms[1]. The underground cable
with various technical difficulties regarding detecting system is very important for distribution especially
and locating their faults. Different factors like in metropolitan cities, airports and defence service,
remarkable charging currents, cable construction and because underground cables are not affected by any
variations from the variety of bonding and grounding adverse weather condition such as storm, snow,
methodologies. Arduino is basically an open source heavy rainfall. But when any fault occur in cable,
hardware used to create interactive electronic objects then it is difficult to locate fault.
consisting of various analog and digital pins, serial
communication interfaces, including USB on some The aim of this project is to determine the distance
models, for loading programs (c++, c, and java) from of underground cable fault from base station in
personal computers. The LCD (liquid crystal display) kilometers. Now the world is become digitalized so
used is of 16*2 displays. In this paper, concept of ohm’s the project is intended to detect the location of fault
law is used. To detect a fault in the cable, the cable must in digital way. The underground cable system is
first be tested for faults. When any fault like short-circuit more common practice followed in many urban
occurs, voltage drop will vary depending on the length of areas. In case if any fault occurs for any reason at
fault in cable, since the current varies. A set of resistors that time the repairing process related to that
are therefore used representing cable length in kilo particular cable is difficult due to not knowing the
meters and fault creation is made by a set of switches at
exact location of cable fault[2]. The fault can be any
every known kilo meters (km’s) to cross-check the
accuracy . The fault occurring at what distance and defect, inconsistency, weakness, current diversion
which phase is displayed on a lcd interfaced with the from its intended path caused by breaking of
arduino. The underground cable system is especially used conductor and failure of insulation.
for distribution in metropolitan cities, airports and
defense service, because underground cables are not
affected by any adverse weather conditions.
2. ADVANTAGES OF UNDERGROUND
CABLE FAULT DETECTION
Keywords: Underground cable, fault location, arduino,
LCD, USB This includes aesthetics, higher public acceptance,
and perceived benefits of protection against
electromagnetic field radiation (which is still present
1. INTRODUCTION in underground lines), fewer interruptions, and
Concerns about the reliability of overhead lines, lower maintenance costs. Failure rates of overhead
increases in their maintenance and operating costs, lines and underground cable is vary widely, but
and issues of typically underground cable outage rates are about
public safety and quality-of-life are leading more half of their equivalent overhead line types.
and more utilities and municipalities to the Potentially far fewer mo interruptions occur from
realization that converting overhead distribution lightning, animals and tree branches falling other
lines to underground is the best way to provide high- wires which de-energize a circuit and then
quality service to their customers, undergrounding reenergize it a mom moment later [3].
provides potential benefits through reduced
operations and maintenance costs, reduced tree

1 Preeti Jaidka, Shreeya Srivastava, Sonal Srivastava, Shiv Pratap Raghuvanshi

 International Journal of Electronics, Electrical and Computational System
IJEECS
ISSN 2348-117X
Volume 5, Issue 5
May 2016

Primary benefits most often cited can be divided terminals of a megger are connected to any two
into four areas conductors. If the megger gives a zero reading it
 Highly, reduced Maintenance and Operating indicates short-circuit fault between these
Costs. conductors.
 Lower storm restoration costs 3. Earth fault
 Increased reliability during severe weather When the conductor of a cable comes in contact
(wind-related storm dame will be greatly with earth, it is called earth fault or ground fault. To
reduced for an underground system. identify this fault, one terminal of the megger is
connected to the conductor and the other terminal
 Improved Reliability. connected to the earth. The megger indicates zero
 Not subject related to flooding and storm surges reading; it means the conductor is earthed [3]. The
experience minimal damage and in interruption same procedure is repeated for other conductors of
of electric service. the cable.
 Less damage during severe weather
 Far fewer momentary interruptions 4. LITERATURE REVIEW
 Improved utility relations regarding tree For electrical usage, transmission lines form the
trimming backbone of power systems. With regard to
reliability and maintenance costs of power delivery,
 Improved Public Safety:
accurate fault location for transmission lines is of
 fewer motor vehicle accidents vital importance in restoring power services and
 Reduced live-wire contact injuries reducing wastage of time as much as possible.
 Fewer Fires. Underground power cables have been widely
implemented due to reliability and environmental
concerns. To improve the reliability of a distribution
3. TYPES OF FAULT IN UNDERGROUND system, accurate identification of a faulted segment
CABLES is required. In the conventional way of detecting
Most common types of fault that occur in fault, an exhaustive search in larger scale distance
underground cables are: has been conducted. This is time consuming and
1. Open circuit fault. inefficient, Not only that the manpower resources
are not utilized, but also the restoration time may
2. Short circuit fault. vary depending on the reliability of the outage
3. Earth fault. information. Hence an efficient technique to locate a
1. Open Circuit Fault fault can improve system reliability. Power systems
When there is a break in the conductor of a cable, it need an accurate and automatic fault location
is called open circuit fault. The open-circuit fault method due to number of key factors namely:
can check by a megger. For this purpose, the three reliability of supply, quality of supply, reducing
conductors of the 3 core cable at far end are short operating costs of repairs and charging staff works
tied and earthed. Then resistance between each practices, and low tariff charges to maintain a
conductors and earth is measured by a megger. The competitive edge.
megger will indicate zero resistance in the circuit of The trend of transmission line construction from
the conductor that is not broken. However if a overhead to underground is increasing even though
conductor is broken the megger will indicate an the underground system costs more for initial
infinite resistance [1]. construction. However, the underground system
requires faster detection and correction of accidental
faults along the lines for more reliable service.
2. Short Circuit Fault Various methods have been developed to reduce
When two conductors of a multi core cable come in damage and inference. But most of fault detection
critical contact with each other due to insulation methods have shortcomings. Some have low
failure, it is so called as short circuit fault. Megger accuracy, some are difficult to apply because of
can also be used to check this fault [5]. The two surrounding environment, and some give unwanted

2 Preeti Jaidka, Shreeya Srivastava, Sonal Srivastava, Shiv Pratap Raghuvanshi

 International Journal of Electronics, Electrical and Computational System
IJEECS
ISSN 2348-117X
Volume 5, Issue 5
May 2016

damage to healthy neighboring cable and facilities ripples are filtered by using capacitor and filtered
[3-4]. Another method that is pulse echoing method supply is then supplied to the input pin of voltage
is also used. This method use time difference regulator 7805. At the output of regulator we get a
between incident and reflected pulse to calculate constant 5V DC supply which is supplied to the
fault location detection and it has relatively high arduino and other components in the circuit [2].
accuracy because it use short period pulse. Although 1. Arduino- It is a powerful single board computer,
it has high accuracy, pulse echoing method has an open source hardware platform allowing creating
some drawbacks. When we apply this method to low interactive electronic objects. It consists of arduino
impedance accident, the error will be increased. If board, set of various analog and digital I/O pins,
cable is not open circuit and there is no impedance serial communication interfaces, including USB on
change, there are no reflected pulse waves, and it is some models, for loading programs from personal
difficult to find fault location. computers [5]. Its platform provides an integrated
Because it is also very expensive system, on-line development environment (IDE) based on the
monitoring and fault location detection of cable processing project, which includes support for C,
using arduino or microcontroller is a better C++ and Java programming languages. This method
automatic digital way to locate faults. features an Atmel Atmega328 operating at 5v with
2kb RAM, 32kb of flash memory for storing
programs and 1kb of EEPROM for storing
5. METHODOLOGY
parameters [4]. The clock speed is 16 MHz which
The Project detects the location of fault in
translates to executing about of 300,000 lines of C
underground cable lines from the base station in
source code per second.
kilometers using an arduino board. It uses the
2. Relay Driver Uln2003 - It is a monolithic high
standard concept of ohms law i.e., when a low dc
voltage and high current Darlington transistor
voltage is applied at the feeder end through a series
arrays. It consists of seven NPN Darlington pairs
resistor to the cable lines, then current would vary
that feature high voltage outputs with common
depending upon the location of fault in the short
cathode clamp for switching inductive loads [5]. It
circuited cable. When there is a short circuit , the
has high current carrying capability of about
voltage across series resistors changes accordingly
500mA.
and fed to an ADC to develop precise digital data
3. Liquid Crystal Display- Most common
which the programmed arduino would display using
displays are 16*2 and 20*2 display. The standard
lcd in kilometers[4]. The project consists of series of
refers to as HD44780U, which refers to the
resistors representing cable length in kilometers and
controller chip which receives data from an external
fault creation is made by a set of switches at every
source (LCD) and communicates with the LCD[4].
known km.
4. Rectifier- It converts ac into pulsating dc with the
help of a bridge rectifier.
5. Voltage Regulators- It is required to maintain a
constant voltage level. Here we use 7805 voltage
regulator.
5.2 The Software requirement in this project are
languages like embedded c, java etc.

6. ALGORITHM AND FLOWCHART

Algorithm of programming used in underground
Figure 1. Block diagram for Cable Fault Detector cable fault detection [4]-
5.1 The hardware requirement of this project are 1. Step: Initialize the ports, declare timer, ADC,
LCD, Crystal, Relays, Relay Driver IC, LCD functions.
Transformer, Diodes, Voltage Regulator, Resistors, 2. Step: Begin an infinite loop; turn on relay 1 by
Capacitors, LEDs, slide switches, Arduino board making pin 0.0 high.
Power supply- The 230V supply is stepped down to 3. Step: Display ―R:‖ at the starting of first line in
a 12V supply by a step down transformer which is lcd.
then converted to DC using a bridge rectifier. AC

3 Preeti Jaidka, Shreeya Srivastava, Sonal Srivastava, Shiv Pratap Raghuvanshi

 International Journal of Electronics, Electrical and Computational System
IJEECS
ISSN 2348-117X
Volume 5, Issue 5
May 2016

4. Step: Call adc Function, depending upon ADC 8. ACKNOWLEDGMENT

output, displays the fault position. We express our deep sense of gratitude to Mrs.
5. Step: Call delay. Preeti Jaidka JSSATE, NOIDA for encouraging
6. Step : Repeat steps 3 to 5 for other two phases us to work on this project and providing her support
and guidance throughout the implementation of the
project.

REFERENCES
[1] Densley, J, ―Ageing mechanisms and diagnostics
for power cables—an overview,‖ IEEE Electr.
Insul. Mag., vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 14–22, Jan./Feb.
2001.
[2] Tarlochan, Sidhu, S., Xu, Zhihan, ―Detection of
Incipient Faults in Distribution Underground
Cables‖, IEEE Transactions on Power Delivery,
Vol. 25, NO. 3, JULY 2010
[3] Fakhrul Islam, Md. Amanullah M T Oo,
Salahuddin Azadl, . A.―Locating Underground
Cable Faults: A Review and Guideline for New
Development‖ , 2013 IEEE
[4] Kuan, K.K.,and Prof. Warwick, K. ― Real-time
expert system for fault location on high voltage
underground distribution cables‖, IEEE
PROCEEDINGS-C, Vol. 139, No. 3, MAY
1992.
Figure 2. Flowchart of Underground Cable Fault [5] E.C.Bascom,―Computerized underground cable
Detector fault location expertise, ‖in Proc. IEEE Power
Eng. Soc.General Meeting, Apr. 10–15,1994,
7. CONCLUSION pp. 376–382.J. Clerk Maxwell, A Treatise on
In this paper the exact location of short circuit fault Electricity and Magnetism, 3rded., vol. 2.
at a particular distance in the underground cable Oxford: Clarendon, 1892, pp.68–73.
from feeder end in km can be located by using [5] Abhishek Pandey, Nicolas H. Younan,
arduino 8051. The concept of OHM’s law is used so ―Underground Cable Fault Detection and
fault can be easily detected and repaired. Identification via Fourier Analysis‖, 2010 IEEE.

4 Preeti Jaidka, Shreeya Srivastava, Sonal Srivastava, Shiv Pratap Raghuvanshi