Design and Application of Surface Wave Sensors for Nonintrusive Power Line Fault Detection

This paper describes a novel conformal surface wave (CSW) launcher that can excite electromagnetic surface waves along unshielded power line cables nonintrusively. This CSW launcher can detect open circuit faults on power cables. Unlike conventional horn-type launchers, this CSW launcher is small, lightweight, and cost effective, and can be placed easily on a power cable. For a nonintrusive open fault detection, the error is <; 5% when the cable length is <; 10 m, which is comparable with other direct-connect fault-finding techniques. For a cable length of 15.14 m, 7.6% error is noted. Besides cable fault detection, the potential applications of the proposed launcher include broadband power line communication and high-frequency power transmission.