Insulated aerial vehicles and high voltage live working in Italy: tests and studies to assess the safety aspects

The use of insulated aerial vehicles (IAVs) allows to carry out many live line maintenance (LLM) tasks efficiently. From a safety perspective, the approach distances must be taken into account. According to the standard IEC-61472, the IAVs must be considered as large metallic floating objects and specific tests and studies must be carried out to determine the dielectric strength. This paper covers the Italian practice for the use of IAVs in the LLM context. It includes some specific studies to verify the safety conditions of this kind of maintenance operations. The study is based on a solid experimental background and treats several tests carried out in high voltage laboratories. The tests take into account most of the configurations encountered. Moreover computing codes, specifically developed, have been used to determine the most critical configurations and to support the experimental results.