Cable Fault Detection Improvement of STDR Using Reference Signal Elimination

Abstract

STDR (sequence time domain reflectometry) to detect a cable fault using a pseudo noise sequence as a reference signal, and time correlation analysis between the reference signal and reflection signal is robust to noisy environments and can detect intermittent faults including open faults and short circuits. On the other hand, if the distance of the fault location is far away or the fault type is a soft fault, attenuation of the reflected signal becomes larger; hence the correlation coefficient in the STDR becomes smaller, which makes fault detection difficult and the measurement error larger. In addition, automation of the fault location by detection of phase and peak value becomes difficult. Therefore, to improve the cable fault detection of a conventional STDR, this paper proposes the algorithm in that the peak value of the correlation coefficient of the reference signal is detected, and a peak value of the correlation coefficient of the reflected signal is then detected after removing the reference signal. The performance of the proposed method was validated experimentally in low-voltage power cables. The performance evaluation showed that the proposed method can identify whether a fault occurred more accurately and can track the fault locations better than conventional STDR despite the signal attenuation. In addition, there was no error of an automatic fault type and its location by the detection of the phase and peak value through the elimination of the reference signal and normalization of the correlation coefficient.