scholarly journals Fast and Accurate Power Line Corridor Survey Using Spatial Line Clustering of Point Cloud

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (8) ◽  
pp. 1571
Author(s):  
Yuchun Huang ◽  
Yingli Du ◽  
Wenxuan Shi

High-voltage and ultra-high-voltage overhead power lines are important to meet the electricity demand of our daily activities and productions. Due to the overgrowth of trees/vegetation within the corridor area, the distance between the power lines and its surroundings may break through the safety threshold, which could cause potential hazards such as discharge and fire. To ensure the safe and stable operation of the power lines, it is necessary to survey them regularly so that the potential hazards from the surroundings within the power line corridor could be investigated timely. This paper is motivated to quickly and accurately survey the power line corridor with the 3D point clouds. The main contributions of this paper include: (1) the spatial line clustering is proposed to accurately classify and complete the power line points, which can greatly overcome the sparsity and missing of LiDAR points within the complex power line corridor. (2) The contextual relationship between power lines and pylon is well investigated by the grid-based analysis, so that the suspension points of power lines on the pylon are well located. (3) The catenary plane-based simplification of 3D spatial distance calculation between power lines and ground objects facilitates the survey of the power line corridor. Experimental results show that the accuracy of safety distance surveying is 5 cm for power line corridors of all voltage levels. Compared to the ground-truth point-to-point calculation, the speed of surveying is enhanced thousands of times. It is promising to greatly improve both the accuracy and efficiency of surveying the potential hazards of power line corridor.

Author(s):  
Yong Zhang ◽  
Xiuxiao Yuan ◽  
Yi Fang ◽  
Shiyu Chen

When the distance between an obstacle and a power line is less than the discharge distance, a discharge arc can be generated, resulting in interruption of power supplies. Therefore, regular safety inspections are necessary to ensure safe operations of power grids. Tall vegetation and buildings are the key factors threatening the safe operation of extra high voltage transmission lines within a power line corridor. Manual or LiDAR based-inspections are time consuming and expensive. To make safety inspections more efficient and flexible, a low-altitude unmanned aerial vehicle remote-sensing platform equipped with optical digital camera was used to inspect power line corridors. We propose a semi-patch matching algorithm based on epipolar constraints using both correlation coefficient and the shape of its curve to extract three dimensional (3D) point clouds for a power line corridor. Virtual photography was used to transform the power line direction from approximately parallel to the epipolar line to approximately perpendicular to epipolar line to improve power line measurement accuracy. The distance between the power lines and the 3D point cloud is taken as a criterion for locating obstacles within the power line corridor automatically. Experimental results show that our proposed method is a reliable, cost effective and applicable way for practical power line inspection, and can locate obstacles within the power line corridor with measurement accuracies better than ±0.5 m.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. e672
Author(s):  
Jean-Romain Roussel ◽  
Alexis Achim ◽  
David Auty

Airborne laser scanning (ALS) has gained importance over recent decades for multiple uses related to the cartography of landscapes. Processing ALS data over large areas for forest resource estimation and ecological assessments requires efficient algorithms to filter out some points from the raw data and remove human-made structures that would otherwise be mistaken for natural objects. In this paper, we describe an algorithm developed for the segmentation and cleaning of electrical network facilities in low density (2.5 to 13 points/m2) ALS point clouds. The algorithm was designed to identify transmission towers, conductor wires and earth wires from high-voltage power lines in natural landscapes. The method is based on two priors i.e. (1) the availability of a map of the high-voltage power lines across the area of interest and (2) knowledge of the type of transmission towers that hold the conductors along a given power line. It was tested on a network totalling 200 km of wires supported by 415 transmission towers with diverse topographies and topologies with an accuracy of 98.6%. This work will help further the automated detection capacity of power line structures, which had previously been limited to high density point clouds in small, urbanised areas. The method is open-source and available online.


Risk Analysis ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 37 (12) ◽  
pp. 2276-2288 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jarry T. Porsius ◽  
Liesbeth Claassen ◽  
Fred Woudenberg ◽  
Tjabe Smid ◽  
Danielle R. M. Timmermans
Keyword(s):  

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 492
Author(s):  
Levente Rácz ◽  
Bálint Németh

Exceeding the electric field’s limit value is not allowed in the vicinity of high-voltage power lines because of both legal and safety aspects. The design parameters of the line must be chosen so that such cases do not occur. However, analysis of several operating power lines in Europe found that the electric field strength in many cases exceeds the legally prescribed limit for the general public. To illustrate this issue and its importance, field measurement and finite element simulation results of the low-frequency electric field are presented for an active 400 kV power line. The purpose of this paper is to offer a new, economical expert system based on dynamic line rating (DLR) that utilizes the potential of real-time power line monitoring methods. The article describes the expert system’s strengths and benefits from both technical and financial points of view, highlighting DLR’s potential for application. With our proposed expert system, it is possible to increase a power line’s safety and security by ensuring that the electric field does not exceed its limit value. In this way, the authors demonstrate that DLR has other potential applications in addition to its capacity-increasing effect in the high voltage grid.


Author(s):  
Z. Sha ◽  
Y. Chen ◽  
W. Li ◽  
C. Wang ◽  
A. Nurunnabi ◽  
...  

Abstract. Road extraction plays a significant role in production of high definition maps (HD maps). This paper presents a novel boundary-enhanced supervoxel segmentation method for extracting road edge contours from MLS point clouds. The proposed method first leverages normal feature judgment to obtain 3D point clouds global geometric information, then clusters points according to an existing method with global geometric information to enhance the boundaries. Finally, it utilizes the neighbor spatial distance metric to extract the contours and drop out existing outliers. The proposed method is tested on two datasets acquired by a RIEGL VMX-450 MLS system that contain the major point cloud scenes with different types of road boundaries. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method provides a promising solution for extracting contours efficiently and completely. Results show that the precision values are 1.5 times higher and approximately equal than the other two existing methods when the recall value is 0 for both tested two road datasets.


2020 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 105-108
Author(s):  
Marko Kaasik ◽  
Sander Mirme

Abstract. The electric power that can be transmitted via high-voltage transmission lines is limited by the Joule heating of the conductors. In the case of coastal wind farms, the wind that produces power simultaneously contributes to the cooling of high-voltage overhead conductors. Ideally this would allow for increased power transmission or decreased dimensions and cost of the conductor wires. In this study we investigate how well the wind speed in coastal wind farms is correlated with wind along a 75 km long 330 kW power line towards inland. It is found that correlations between wind speed in coastal wind farms at turbine height and conductor-level (10 m) are remarkably lower (R=0.39–0.64) than between wind farms at distances up to 100 km from each other (R=0.76–0.97). Dense mixed forest surrounding the power line reduces both local wind speed and the correlations with coastal higher-level wind, thus making the cooling effect less reliable.


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