Enabling technologies for distributed temperature monitoring of smart power cables

The increasing diffusion of renewable energy generators throughout the power transmission systems, and the difficulties in building new transmission assets are leading the power system components to work closest to their design limits, increasing the risk of congestion and reducing their operation reliability and safety. The need for fully exploiting the advantages of renewable energy sources, mitigating the effects of system congestions, is pushing power system operators to apply advanced loading policies based on Dynamic Thermal Rating, considering the actual boundary conditions for conductors heat exchange processes. The possibility to apply these techniques in power cables loading is a very strategic issue, since it could reduce the congestion among critical market zones. Although the application of these techniques in real operating scenario is still at its infancy, and limited to several prototype implementations, in the scientific literature a large range of techniques are proposed for dynamic line temperature monitoring. A very interesting methodology to afford this problem lies in fiber optic-based distributed temperature sensing methodologies, which can play a key role in cables thermal monitoring by providing reliable time-spatial temperature profiles, and being immune to any kind of electromagnetic disturb. Armed with such a vision in this paper detailed experimental results obtained by applying an advanced fiber optic-based sensor for temperature monitoring of a real power cable under different operation and laying conditions are presented and discussed.