Wireless sensor system for overhead line ampacity monitoring

Due to the economic pressures of internationalized energy market together with rising demand for electrical power, a growing need has been observed in recent years to increase ampere capacity (ampacity) of high voltage overhead transmission line infrastructure. Long construction time, difficult legal procedures and cost considerations encourage the line operators to exploit the wide margins of the traditional worst-case condition oriented overhead line design. To operate the transmission lines closer to the limits of their instantaneous weather dependent ampacity, live monitoring of line state must be employed. In this paper we propose an extensible sensor system for overhead conductor temperature and current measurement. The system comprises of sensor units mounted directly on the high voltage conductors, which acquire the current and temperature data and transmit it to a ground interfacing unit connected to line operator´s control system computer network.