Underground Monitoring
Why It's Important
Underground circuits are more resilient and experience less frequent faults. But they also have less remote visibility so when a fault occurs outage durations are longer. To overcome these challenges utilities are turning to underground line sensing and analytics to enable proactive remote monitoring and improve reliability.
How It Works
Sentient Energy’s solution for monitoring underground circuits includes line sensors for feeders (UM3+) and URD (UM1), plus the Ample Analytics Platform. Sensors communicate via cellular or mesh networks to Ample which aggregates sensor data, visualizes it, and provides an interface to integrate the data with utility OT/IT systems such as SCADA, OMS, ADMS.
Key Features
The Sentient Energy underground line sensors capture system data for fault location and load monitoring. This provides utilities with greater remote visibility of underground circuits to more quickly react to outages and to proactively prevent them. Features include:
Line Sensors
- ANSI/IEEE 495
- Accurate fault magnitudes and load current measurements (+/- 1%)
- 256 samples per cycle waveform capture
- Phase identification, conductor temperature, and excursions above and below current and temperature thresholds (MM3ai only)
Ample
- On-premises or cloud deployment
- API for integration with SCADA/OMS/ADMS
Underground Monitoring Benefits
Implementing line sensing and analytics on underground circuits modernizes the ongoing management and maintenance of these segments of the distribution grid delivering the following benefits:
- More precise fault location results in reduced fault-finding times and shorter outages which improve reliability metrics and reduce O&M costs.
- Load data helps system planning teams improve the accuracy of network load flow models for better decision-making, identify phase imbalance to improve efficiency, and detect overloaded cable segments and transformers to enhance asset management.
