Date of Award

1-1-2010

Document Type

Campus Access Dissertation

Department

Electrical Engineering

First Advisor

Mohammod Ali

Abstract

Automated wireless sensors to monitor infrastructure, such as power systems have drawn a great deal of attention in the research community recently. To ensure reliable and uninterrupted power supply, sensors can be developed which will probe the power cables non-intrusively, transmit the fault information wirelessly to a central control unit and harvest the required energy for the operation of the sensor. This work explores and develops new ideas to design and develop automated, self-sustaining wireless sensor patches that can be distributed on power transmission lines.

The primary thrusts of this dissertation are on (1) in-situ static electric field type sensor development which can be wrapped around power line cables in critical locations that are more prone to insulation damage either due to high humidity and temperature, (2) a broadband conformal low-profile surface wave exciter development which can be used to inject a broadband pulse to determine the location of faults using reflectometry principles such as time domain reflectometry, frequency domain reflectometry or joint time frequency domain reflectometry, (3) efficient 915 MHz antenna design with wide pattern and gain coverage to support the data telemetry functions of the sensor, and finally (4) a miniature energy harvester design and development using thin high permeability magnetic materials, which can charge the batteries needed to make the non-intrusive wireless sensor functional.

Rights

© 2010, Rashed Bhuiyan

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