Fault Location: A Gentle Approach

Following a cable fault, standard procedure is detecting the location of the fault, traditionally using methods such as Time Domain Reflectometry (TDR) or a Thumper Test. Limitations with TDR include the inability to consistently locate high impedance faults, while the Thumper Test places a large amount of energy on the cable, potentially stressing the cable and causing further damage.

LIVE HV has developed and begun to utilise Partial Discharge (PD) techniques, which alleviate the limitations of traditional methods. This method produces consistently accurate fault locations while causing no further harm to the cable.
At lower voltages the fault location on a cable will begin to arc. This arc behaves in a similar way to Partial Discharge (PD). Through the application of PD location techniques, the location of the failure on the cable can be quickly and accurately determined without further damaging the cable.