Intelligent Inspection of Transmission Lines & EHV Towers with T-Pulse Maintenance Assistant

Continuous proper functioning of the power systems is essential if we are to meet the supply demands. Ensuring an acceptable level of reliability in all parts of the power system, from generation to distribution, has always been a major concern for network managers. 

Asset management and routine maintenance have a considerable impact on ensuring system reliability, reducing expensive crashes, and preventing shutdowns. But at the same time, manual asset inspection methods are time-consuming and prone to safety hazards. 

This situation creates the need for a system that can perform autonomous, real-time assessments and report the same to management using digital solutions. 

The maintenance team working for a prominent power distributor in India wanted to completely automate the inspection process for their dissemination assets like transmission lines and EHV towers. Unable to predict faults, degradations, imbalances, or track low-tension distribution assets, they intended to deploy AI technology to help with visual and sensory inspections for their assets. 

The Advent of Detect 

At Detect Technologies, we are building the future of industrial processes and accelerating the path towards digital transformation. After thoroughly assimilating the needs of the Power Distributor, we understood their workflows, unified their data, and completely automated their inspection processes with T-Pulse™. 

T-Pulse’s LT Distribution Assistant is designed to provide continuous insights into the instantaneous condition of electrical assets across the entire distribution network. These insights are generated after a near real-time processing of data from visual, thermal, and other sensory sources, deployed at strategic intervals. 

An amalgamation of patented hardware and sophisticated numeric models, T-Pulse for Asset Inspections, leveraged AI algorithms to mine out information on asset degradation to evoke optimal maintenance responses.  

With T-Pulse for Asset Inspections, reliability engineers working for the distributor could seamlessly identify points of degradation, the reason for degradation like corrosion, missing/loose components, and general structural damages. 

Additionally, the platform enabled: 

• Web-based task management 
• Live surveillance and monitoring 
• Seamless logging and retrieval of historical information 
• Long-term operational trends for policy formulation 
• Intelligent drone deployment and management 
• Component-wise breakdown of faults, maintenance recommendations and required spares.  
• Unity of command over connected assets  

Real-Time Power Supply Management with T-Pulse 

Over 9000+ components were inspected every 100kms with 45+ issues being detected per EHV tower! T-Pulse helped the client manage the health of their entire distribution network from a single dashboard unifying all aspects of monitoring, management, and maintenance. 

The organization ended up saving thousands of man-hours’ worth of inspection time thanks to 360-degree coverage provided by T-Pulse. Within a month of deployment, T-Pulse autonomously detected and reported 8 major faults that could have potentially compromised the entire system had they not been addressed preemptively. 

From inspecting a single asset every few days, the management could now inspect 100s of them daily and from the convenience of their offices/homes. This in turn enhanced the overall workflow and reduced response time as all stakeholders could now decide backed by solid insights. On an average, a positive 50% decrease in average decision making time was observed.