Locating underground cable faults: A review and guideline for new development

Occurrences of underground cable faults in the power transmission and distribution system is unavoidable due to several reasons. Long outage of power supply can cause the power distributors and retailers heavy loss of revenue and discomfort of the customers. Therefore, a quick detection and rectification of the faults is a major concern of the power distributors and retailers. This paper reviews a number of high voltage cable fault locating techniques that are currently in practice and a number of state-of-the-art techniques based on highly computational methods proposed by the research community. The paper also presents some guideline for the design process of a compact and lightweight high voltage fault locating machines that can make the fault locating task easier and faster.