IOT BASED UNDERGROUND CABLE FAULT DETECTOR

Abstract

Underground cables are prone to a wide variety of faults due to underground conditions, wear and tear, rodents etc. Also detecting fault source is difficult and entire line is to be dug in order to check entire line and fix faults. So here we propose a cable fault detection that detects the exact fault position that makes repairing work very easy. The repairmen know exactly which part has fault and only that area is to be dug to detect the fault source. This saves a lot of time, money and efforts and also allows to service underground cables faster.
The system detects fault with the help of potential divider network laid across the cable. Whenever a fault gets created at a point shorting two lines together, a specific voltage gets generated as per the resistors network combination. This voltage is sensed by the microcontroller and is updated to the user. The information conveyed to the user is the distance to which that voltage corresponds to. The microcontroller retrieves the fault line data and displays over LCD display. The fault in the cable will be identifying by measuring the change in voltage value measured across the resistor is then fed to the in-built ADC of the Arduino. This value is processed by the Arduino and the fault is calculated in terms of distance from the base station. This value is sent to the LCD interfaced to the Arduino board and it displays exact location of the fault from the base station in kilometres for all the three phases. This project is arranged with a set of resistors which represent the length of the cable. At all known kilometre fault switches are placed to induce faults manually. Finally, the fault distance can be determined. The values will be upload to the IoT web app using in-built WIFI of the NodeMCU microcontroller.