Our customer faced a challenge of taking hours to identify the location of the fault. This was due to the terrain and weather difficulties in the high altitudes of the Himalayas. Adding on to that was the currents running in both directions – generating stations as well as the collecting substations run by the utility.
Moreover, a single line is usually a merger between 2 or more plants – hence making it extremely difficult to identify the location of the fault using conventional methods.
For anyone who is aware of the terrain and daily challenges of the region, they would know that mobilizing a team to traverse a 15-20km line in the Himalayas is a job for more than 3-4 hours by 3 or more separate teams. Adding on to it is the challenge of unstable network coverages throughout.
The clamp-on type FPIs of 3 different types including bi-directional, waveform detection, and traditional ones failed to solve this problem given the uniqueness of this network.
In cooperation with SafeGrid (Finland), we were able to successfully identify the location of the faults in these challenging circumstances within 10 seconds, saving millions for our customer and giving them the ability to reduce their downtime from an average of 6 hours to 1 hour.