High accuracy location of faults on electrical lines using digital processing of sampled data records from a reflectogram

Abstract

A signal processing algorithm is developed to estimate the location of a discontinuity, e.g. a fault, on an electrical line. It is applied to fast sampled data and performs pecstral analysis of pulsed signals. The pecstrum algorithm is based on a transform similar to the one used in the cepstrum technique. It is demonstrated both theoretically and experimentally that the performance of the pecstrum estimator is significantly better than that of previously proposed methods. The proposed solution is operational in industrial digital reflectometers and has proved to be robust and successful in practice. With respect to cable-fault location, accuracies up to 30 cm are obtained when a fast, 20-MHz, 8-bit sampler is used for the acquisition of pulsed signals in a reflectogram.