Detection of Broken Strands of Transmission Line Conductors Using Fiber Bragg Grating Sensors

Transmission lines are affected by Aeolian vibration, which causes strands to break and eventually causes an entire line to break. In this paper, a method for monitoring strand breaking based on modal identification is proposed. First, the natural frequency variation of a conductor caused by strand breakage is analyzed, and a modal experiment of the LGJ-95/15 conductor is conducted. The measurement results show that the natural frequencies of the conductor decrease with an increasing number of broken strands. Next, a monitoring system incorporating a fiber Bragg grating (FBG)-based accelerometer is designed in detail. The FBG sensor is mounted on the conductor to measure the vibration signal. A wind speed sensor is used to measure the wind speed signal and is installed on the tower. An analyzer is also installed on the tower to calculate the natural frequencies, and the data are sent to the monitoring center via 3G. Finally, a monitoring system is tested on a 110 kV experimental transmission line, and the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) method and stochastic subspace identification (SSI) method are used to identify the natural frequencies of the conductor vibration. The experimental results show that SSI analysis provides a higher precision than does STFT and can extract the natural frequency under various wind speeds as an effective basis for discriminating between broken strands.