DETECTING AND LOCATING POWER OUTAGES VIA LOW VOLTAGE GRID MAPPING

摘要

In a power grid capable of electrical power delivery and power line communications, a distribution transformer and at least one smart meter is connected to the power grid. In one embodiment, the distribution transformer is configured to map the smart meters on the power grid to a virtual grid based upon measurements of signal metrics received from the various smart meters on the power grid, and the virtual grid is used to determine if a failure has occurred on the physical grid. A communications failure between nodes on the grid suggests a possible power failure, and the failure can be located using mapping information obtained from the virtual grid. A drop in power consumption on the power grid corroborates outages detected via the communications failure. In one embodiment, a cross phase delta value is computed to adjust the signal strength metrics measured between nodes having differing phases of electrical distribution.

主权项

1. A method, comprising:
mapping a plurality of nodes to a virtual grid, the virtual grid being a representation of the nodes on a physical grid; assigning a sequence of metrics to each node on the virtual grid, the metrics comprising signal margin and failure history; performing statistical analysis of the metrics assigned to the nodes on the virtual grid; and detecting a failure on the physical grid, based upon the statistical analysis of the metrics assigned to the nodes on the virtual grid.