A new approach for local detection of failures and global diagnosis of LV switchboards

This paper deals with an original diagnosis system for LV switchboards. It is based on a local and global diagnosis approach with local temperature and current measurements. The thermal measurements including ambient and temperatures near electrical joint, are done by wireless thermal sensors. The system is composed of three complementary stages: An internet data collection stage, and two centralized data processing stages for the local detection of failures and the global diagnosis respectively. The analyses done with the diagnosis stage lead to predictive maintenance recommendations in order to avoid LV switchboard breakdown, which although rare could be catastrophic. Each stage of the centralized data processing is presented and discussed. Some results based on experimental data and expertise´s information are presented to validate the feasibility of these methods.