Reduce operational and maintenance costs with Synaptec’s unique OHL sensors.

MV-HV power operators often run into maintenance issues with overhead power lines often located in hard to reach places. Synaptec can reduce operational costs with our unique, passive overhead line sensors.

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Slava Tavoletti

Slava Tavoletti

Power Grids – Europe

Nitin Mahajan

Nitin Mahajan

Power Grids – India, GCC & SE Asia

Saul Matthews

Saul Matthews

Power Grids – Rest of World

Challenges in overhead line monitoring

Overhead power lines are required to reach the most remote or inaccessible locations, often traversing very different weather systems. This presents both operational and maintenance challenges for operators.

Operational challenges 

From an operational perspective, the challenge is Dynamic Line Rating (DLR), and to know the line ampacity, or its safe thermal limits at critical points along the route in real time. This is influenced heavily by variable weather conditions, principally wind velocity and solar radiation, and by the circuit load current.

Maintenance challenges 

From a maintenance perspective, the challenge is the cost and low frequency of manual inspection visits to identify potential failures, such as storm damage, ice accretion, or hotspots from conductor fatigue.  

Our Solution

Our passive sensors are ideal for automating both monitoring tasks in one system (Synchromerger), providing earlier warning to failures in the most remote and inaccessible places.  

Synaptec’s unique, passive sensors are retrofittable to any number of individual conductors and towers to give live and detailed visibility of sag, vibration, and temperature. By correlating mechanical measurements from our line-mounted sensors with electrical current monitoring, we provide true DLR with a more detailed, instantaneous and localised view of ampacity than weather forecasts for a general area. 

Without any need for cellular network access, power supplies, batteries, maintenance, or recalibration, our passive sensors can be deployed safely and rapidly anywhere. We provide real-time, synchronous, and permanent monitoring of temperature, vibration, strain, current, and voltage in the same system. This provides early warning of failures to enable more efficient maintenance, and location-specific validation of ampacity estimates derived from weather data. 

Why the Synaptec solution is different

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Requires no power supplies, telecoms equipment or 4G service

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No ongoing maintenance (e.g. batteries)

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Sensor lifespan of 25+ years

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Sensors require no periodic calibration

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Integrates with SCADA and third party data for RTTR/DLR forecasting

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Easily retrofits to any MV or HV line

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Sensor operational temperature range -40°C to +80°C

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Use standard single mode fibre

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Live correlation of current, voltage, temperature, vibration and strain in one scalable condition monitoring system

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All measurements are time synced

Download our overhead line monitoring application note

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Applications

Mixed circuit protection

OHL sag, ampacity and Dynamic Line Rating (DLR)

Wide area multi-ended differential protection

Digital substations

Cable condition monitoring

Wide area monitoring

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Power grids

Renewables

Industrial