Joint faults detection in LV switchboard and its global diagnosis, through a Temperature Monitoring System

The paper deals with an entire system of monitoring and diagnosis of LV switchboards based on the measurements of currents, ambient temperatures and local temperatures of electrical joints. This system meets the needs to prevent the breakdowns of LV switchboards, which, although rare, can involve huge financial and human loss. The thermal measurements are done by wireless thermal sensor. The measured data are transmitted via internet and collected in a server, to be centrally processed. This centralized data processing includes a local detection of failures and a global diagnosis which leads to some maintenance recommendations. This paper will focus on, the local detection by comparison with an healthy model, and the global diagnosis using Bayesian network technique. The feasibility of these methods is tested with experimental data and expert´s information.