Real Time Condition Monitoring for High Voltage Cables at Industrial City Abu Dhabi

Posted At : November 12, 2009 3:22 AM | Posted By : LIOS Technology
Related Categories: Asset Management, Grid Operations, Grid Security, Outage Management, Risk & Operations, SCADA, Substations, T&D Asset Management, T&D Automation, Underground T&D

For TRANSCO’s project ICAD (Industrial City Abu Dhabi ) the German DTS manufacturer LIOS Technology GmbH provided its well recognized DTS(Distributed Temperature Sensing) equipment along with RTTR (Real Time Thermal Rating) to monitor the temperature of the power cables supplied by cable manufacturer Silec Cable in France.

This project runs on three circuits of 6km each equipped with fibre optic cables.

The online measured, distributed temperature information of the monitored cable system is especially valuable for dynamic rating. LIOS provides an integrated Real Time Thermal Rating (RTTR) evaluation via a well defined interface between its data visualisation software and a commercialised cable ampacity program. These two technologies are efficiently combined to produce a system capable of computing the future cable ampacity based on real-time temperature measurements. The actual maximum temperature reading of each configured cable section and the actual electrical current reading are evaluated for dynamic cable rating based on IEC standardised methods (mainly IEC 60287 and IEC 60853). When the geometry of the installation is not included in the IEC standards, the RTTR evaluation uses finite element methodologies to complement the IEC calculations.

The RTTR engine computes the current-carrying capacity (or ampacity) of underground cables in steady and transient states. Cable operators are especially interested in transient simulations to estimate the current that can be safely transferred from another circuit due to emergency situations (maintenance, outages, faults, etc.). Typical situations include emergency ratings for 20 minutes, three hours, 24 hours and up to one week.

Power cable monitoring combined with dynamic ampacity rating provides valuable data to operators:

Steady State and Transient Operation – Power cable conductor temperature at the core of the conductor
Transient Operation - Emergency ratings, transient calculations for Time, Current, Temperature

Read more on how to ensure save and stable grid operation and how to activate hidden capacity reserves: