Mobile High Voltage Power Line Thermometer

Abstract Modern power grids perform systematically important tasks with immense capital investment behind them. Infrastructure monitoring is an important field in this industry to guarantee safety, prevent damages and optimize transmission. Accurate readings of environmental variables also help power operators design new infrastructure. Operators address this by visual monitoring, and through the use of sensors placed on high voltage lines. Traditionally, these sensors are permanently installed and require lines to be powered down for deployment and removal. The required disruption of service is associated with high costs and therefore undesirable. Axiomatic Design Theory highlighted unnecessary coupling between disruption and measurement as an opportunity. This paper details a design for a thermometer unit that can be deployed to and removed from a live power line. The device can provide temperature measurements to be used in conjunction with visual LiDAR scans to model the behavior of high voltage lines at different load levels to gauge line sag. Mechanisms were designed to safely fasten the thermometer to a live high voltage line via a VTOL drone and for it to detach given a preset time. In case of system failure, the device removes itself through a variety of redundant fail-safe mechanisms inspired by the Information Axiom. The success of key design concepts was confirmed through 3D printed prototype testing on a section of a surrogate conductor line in a controlled environment.