Seminar: Reflectometry-Based Electrical Cable Soft Fault Diagnosis, 14th July, 3.30p

When: Wednesday 14th July, 3.30pm AEST (please note the unusual day and time!)

Where: This seminar will be presented online via Zoom, RSVP here.

Speaker: Dr Qinghua Zhang (INRIA, France)

Title: Reflectometry-Based Electrical Cable Soft Fault Diagnosis

Abstract:
For the diagnosis of electrical cable failures, reflectometry-based methods analyze reflected waves in response to the injection of an incident wave into the tested cable. This technology is mainly applied to the detection of hard faults characterized by important impedance discontinuities. This talk is about the detection of soft faults, characterized by weak impedance variations, with no or slight impedance discontinuities. Classical reflectometry-based methods focusing on reflections from discontinuities become ineffective. On the one hand, the possible soft faults are of unknown shapes and at unknown positions, on the other hand, reflectometry measurements are made from a single end of the cable. Based on the telegrapher’s equations, the presented method computes the characteristic impedance distributed along the cable from reflectometry measurements made at one end of the tested cable. The developed fast algorithm is particularly suitable for real time fault diagnosis. The performance of this method is illustrated by experimental results.

Bio:
Qinghua Zhang received his B.S. in 1986 from University of Sciences and Technologies of China and his PhD in 1991 from Université de Rennes. He was a post-doctorant during 1992 at the Automatic Control Division of Linköping University. Since 1993 he works at National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation (INRIA) as a researcher, and since 2001 as a senior researcher. His main research interests are in nonlinear system identification, fault diagnosis and signal processing.