PLC applied to fault detection on in-vehicle power line
Résumé
With an increase in number of cables in transportation systems as in aircraft and cars, fault detection in power network becomes a critical issue for security and maintenance. To achieve this goal, reflectometry techniques have been widely studied but the possibility of using a power line communication has also been proposed. In this paper, the sensitivity of such a method for detecting hard and soft faults is investigated. Channel transfer functions have been measured on a twisted pair, placed within a multiconductor transmission line, and in presence of such faults. The variation of the channel characteristics in a frequency range extending up to 100 MHz is first studied. Two simple detection methods based either on correlation or Euclidian distance are then considered. To study their feasibility, an OFDM link based on the well known HPAV standard, thus with a frequency bandwidth limited to 37.5 MHz, has been simulated, the estimated transfer functions being deduced from training sequences, taking background noise into account.