Saul Matthews | 3 minute read | 06 December 2021

Affordable, resilient monitoring of overhead power lines

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In 2021, Synaptec completed their trial with Deutsche Bahn (DB) to implement a radical new Distributed Electrical Sensing (DES) platform, as part of a DB mindbox program. Passive sensors were deployed to locate and characterise the impact of train movements on overhead power lines.

The trial demonstrated the potential for DES to implement rapid detection and protection of faulted sections, early warning of failure modes, danger alarms, and pantograph anomalies.

Instant alarms

Warning of dangerous loss of tension in the contact wire

The challenge

Operating a national, complex rail network means that DB are faced with many challenges that utility operators also come up against. With billions of customers relying heavily on their daily operation, it is imperative that DB maximise capacity safely, whilst reducing operating costs.

With over 40,000 km of electrified rail in Germany, DB recognised the need to embrace new technologies to maintain and improve service, overcoming the limitations of manual inspection of critical electrical and infrastructural assets which are often remote or hard-to-reach.

Synaptec worked with DB to retrofit their unique DES and Distributed Mechanical Sensing (DMS) technologies to provide early warning of failure modes in their Overhead Line Equipment (OLE) and power system assets to avoid costly outages.

Electrified rail networks require particularly high uptime and robustness to deal with increasing demand and availability of service, but are subject to electrical and mechanical failure risks, including contact wire sag, pantograph strikes, contact wire degradation and fatigue, electrical faults and flashover. Detection and management of all of these issues currently relies on scheduled manual inspection and maintenance of OLE infrastructure, which is expensive, infrequent, and halts revenue-generating traffic.