The Edison Idea iDP-210 Feeder relay includes Cooper's exclusive Incipient Cable Splice Fault (ICSF) Detector algorithm. A primary cause of buried cable failures is moisture ingress in buried cable splices. This water eventually causes a fault within the splice. The fault current that flows turns the water into gas in an explosive manner. This explosion actually extinguishes the arc, ending the fault in a fraction of a cycle. These events have very specific waveform signatures. It has also been shown that time interval between these so-called "self-extinguishing faults" is an accurate predictor of pending cable splice failure on distribution circuits.
The ICSF algorithm detects these waveform signatures and can provide alarm levels on either a simple raw count of events, or based on the number of events which occur in a given time period.
Use of the ICSF logic in the iDP-210 can prevent the degradation of reliability indices due to the reduction in unscheduled outages caused by cable splice failures.
Monetary savings may also be accrued by scheduling maintenance crews rather than by using on an emergency basis - after all, don't most cables usually fail in the middle of a stormy night?
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