One of the biggest headaches faced by U.S. utility companies could be consigned to history with the development of an acoustical system that constantly checks the health of power lines by listening to them.
With thousands of miles of power lines strung high up across valleys, rivers and canyons, there is no cheap and easy way for utility companies to tell where weaknesses are developing ... until it's too late. And once a power line has failed, it's an extremely costly business to fix, not even considering the inconvenience to frustrated customers.
Often it isn't obvious where along the line the failure has occurred. Helicopters are routinely used to scan the lines looking for potential problems but this system is expensive and imprecise at best. Sometimes the problem can't even be seen because it's occurred in earthing wires buried underground where they are attached to ground mat risers, or inside marker balls of a transmission line.
Solving the difficulty of precisely predicting where faults will occur along miles and miles of power lines - and fixing them before failures happen - has long been something of a holy grail for the world's utility companies.
A team of Colorado School of Mines scientists believe they have cracked the problem with the development of a high frequency acoustic transmitter and receiver. The device can be attached to the live power line at any point, enabling it to be operated at ground level. By listening to and analyzing the acoustical profile of the line, repairmen can not only detect a problem, but the device will also pin point precisely where on the line the problem can be found.
Called the Electro-Magnetic Acoustic Transducer (EMAT), it is currently undergoing laboratory trials in Golden, Colo., and will be tested in the field this summer.
Already utility companies around the world are showing a great deal of interest in this invention which is awaiting final patent approval.
For more information, go to http://egweb.mines.edu/aceps/
Contact:
Leah McNeill
(303) 273-3302
Pager 303-915-8440
[email protected]
Web Site: http://www.mines.edu/All_about/public
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