For many years a MOV surge arrester has been considered as an important protective device on the high voltage transmission lines as well as at the substations. Although it has proven to be a powerful device in the protective applications, its quality would be deteriorated over time, especially under a moisture environment, and a situation of experiencing multiple times of over stressed strikes. This quality deterioration can be characterized with an increased level of leakage current through the metal-oxide material, which could accumulate heat and stress, and in the worst cases, lead to set fire on or trigger explosion of the device itself.
Based on such a reason that understanding of the health of an arrester is as equivalent important as the arrester itself, a monitoring device was aftermath born to bear this task. An original type of such device is called electromagnetic mechanical counter, driven by striking current, featured as a non-source device, proven to be simple and robust, has been widely used for many years. However, one fatal drawback in this modern time is that it has to be installed at a lofty location and cannot transmit the data to a remote site, so it is hard to access for reading the readings under many circumstances, which is not compatible and tolerable at all with our nowadays high speed communication era.
Our innovative products are aimed to fill this capability gap by remotely and timely evaluating the condition of surge arrestors and automatically reporting the data back to a location for analysis. It is realized through the deployment of our proprietary sensing block combined with a state-of-the-art wireless network communication system. It can monitor the leakage current of the MOA, count the surges, and record the event time. The said wireless network system can be IEEE 802.15.4 compliant mesh networks, GSM/GPRS cellular networks, or a combination of both.
For a mesh network of IEEE 802.15.4 compliant alone, the system is applicable for the no-cell-signal zones. A handheld or a PDA device would be necessary for downloading the data from a certain distance away in the line of sight.
For a GSM/GPRS cellular network the data can be transmitted directly to a cloud server through TCP/IP protocols or can be encrypted and transmitted to an intranet for the sake of keeping the data secret.
For a case of combined networking, the data can be first collected from sparsely distributed nodes along the power grid transmission line and transmitted to a central node through a mesh network from where it can be transmitted in a sequence to a remote data management center through a cellular communication network.
Our SmartBee surge arrester on-line monitoring products are getting wide applications in high voltage transmission lines. For the detailed features and specs, please click here.