Underground Cable Fault Detection System by Using IoT

The objective of this paper is to determine the location of the fault in underground cable lines from the source station to the exact location of the fault in kilometers. Whenever a fault occurs in the underground cable line for some reason, the repairing process relating to that faulted cable becomes difficult owing to the lack of a proper system for tracking the exact fault location and the type of fault that occurred in the cable. For this, a system has to be developed to find the exact location of the fault in the distribution system for all the three phases R, Y & B for a different type of situations of faults. Here in this paper single line to ground, double line to ground & three-phase faults have been considered. Therefore, the basic concept of Ohm’s law is found suitable in principle to develop a fault location tracking system. Based on the Ohm’s Law, it is found that the resistance of the cable is proportional to its length under constant conditions of temperature and the cross-section area and therefore if a low DC voltage is applied at the feeder end through a series of resistor in cable lines, the current would vary depending upon the location of a fault in the cable. Whenever the fault occurs in the underground cable it is difficult to detect the accurate location of the fault for the process of repairing that particular cable. The proposed system finds the exact location of the fault. The fault occurring distance, phase, and time are displayed on a 16X2 LCD interfaced with the microcontroller. IoT is used to display the information over the Internet using the Wi-Fi module ESP8266.