Temperature monitoring of switchgear utilizing Surface Acoustic Wave wireless sensors

Monitoring the temperature of medium and high voltage switchgear is proving to be a very important diagnostic for the protection of switchgear from catastrophic failure damage, for the prevention of expensive outages, and for the safety of switchgear technicians & maintenance personnel. In addition, monitoring the temperature of critical parts of the switchgear can increase the energy transmission efficiency. Switchgear distributes electrical current which can rise to a few thousand amperes and thus heat up the switchgear busbars. Overheating of the bus-bars can be caused by corrosion, defect or overloading of the switchgear. This article describes and focuses on passive wireless temperature sensors using Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW) sensor technology. This is the break-through monitoring and diagnostic solution for such critical environments, as well as the replacement for existing traditional temperature sensing solutions within the switchgear application. One key advantage of wirelessly-read SAW sensors is their completely passive operation: SAW-based temperature sensors require no batteries or other power supply. This results in reducing the maintenance cost, the weight and dimensions and of the sensor, while also reducing environmental impact through the absence of batteries that ultimately would need to be discarded.