All street excavations carry a potentially serious risk of hitting a live electrical cable. These cable strikes are a continual safety concern for network operations. The risk of significant injury to operatives is currently mitigated using tools and procedures, however there are many situations where this risk is not at zero. Current cable locating technology requires the cable to be either radiating a magnetic field due to carrying power or remotely energised in a way that creates a signal that a detector can then pick up. There are occasions on the electricity distribution network where cables have been terminated (not feeding a demand) leaving a live cable in the ground that is not creating a magnetic field, these are known across the industry as “Pot End Cables”. In addition, cables carrying balanced loads may also not create a magnetic field that can be detected. At present, the EIC has found that there is no commercial device that can detect Pot End or balanced cables or locate these services with any great accuracy. Cadent have also collected data on cable strikes and have observed that 25% are due to pot-ends which still leaves a significant amount of strikes on cables that current equipment and procedures should find. It has become clear that the work in this project will enable a specific product that will find both pot-end cables and ones that are in normal service along with metal pipes and armoured network cables. Cadent also spend significant effort and cost on training staff on the current products. This project may create a specific product that in addition to the above reduces training and on-site effort thus creating significant business benefits beyond the original aim of detecting pot end cables. Previous phases cost: I-0050 £87,000 & I-0123 £369,000 these phases looked at feasibility, understanding the coils and proving the depth and identification of cables was possible. Using the learnings from these previous phases has supported the scope of this third phase
Objectives
Stage 3a Objectives – Research and Design The design tasks will create an architecture for the electronics and embedded software design activities to work against. Schematic diagrams will be created as an input to PCB layout. This will also incorporate prototype design.
Stage 3b Objectives – Stage Sample Build, Testing, Laboratory Demonstration and training Stage 3b work will be concentrated on building, testing and refining two prototypes, one for delivery to the EIC/Cadent teams on site and the other for back-up at TTP. The tasks outlined below are a significant part of the programme as the engineering is still at an experimental stage and is now required to be used outside of TTP by non-engineers. A local to TTP supplier will be used to manufacture and assemble the circuit boards, packaging and arrays from the design output.