On line wire diagnosis using Multicarrier Time Domain Reflectometry for fault location

A method for on line wire diagnosis using reflectometry is presented. It consists in detecting and locating electric faults in wiring networks while the target system is running. Since the system is diagnosed on line, it is necessary to minimize interferences between the target system and the reflectometer. The Multicarrier Time Domain Reflectometry presented here allows a complete control of the spectrum of the injected signal in order to adapt it to the application constraints. The measurement error due to the spectrum distortion and a post-processing is proposed to provide valid reflectometry result close to those of classical methods for complex networks.