New type of fiber optic sensor network for smart grid interface of transmission system

Smart Grid is aimed to incorporate monitoring, analysis, control and communication capabilities to improve reliability and energy efficiency. However, currently there is no enough sensor to provide information interface for the implementation of smart grid. Therefore, new types of sensors should be deployed to assist the implementation of smart grid. This paper proposes a novel scheme, in which new type of fiber optic sensors (as compared with traditional Farady effect based fiber optic sensor used in power system instrumentation) are used to provide multiple types of information for smart grid. The new Fiber Bragg Gratting (FBG) is advantageous in that it can collect variant types of information and can form a sensor network. A transmission line monitoring system with distributed fiber optic senor network is designed, and the procedures to evaluate the status of the overhead transmission line (such as sag, vibration, and galloping) are proposed. A testing setup is built at laboratory, and it is shown that the FBG sensor is capable of obtaining the comprehensive information for evaluating the status of the overhead transmission line.