Ice detection on power lines

Challenge

Frozen lines can break or pull down poles under the weight of the ice, leaving people and companies without electric energy. To prevent these emergency situations, a very large Italian Energy Supplier chooses the smart site monitoring approach of Italtel to detect in time ice accretion on electric cables.

Thanks to Italtel, a solution based on Internet of Things technology leverages distributed temperature sensors to get instant notification in case of heavy weight on the cables due to the formation of ice in order to act before the cable breaks.

Solution

1. DESCRIPTION
   The IoT solution is composed by:
   • LoRaWAN (Long Range Wide Area Network) sensors to measure the total or partial expansion of the metal joint, used to avoid cable breakage
   • dedicated LoRaWAN network built on top of Cisco technology and the activity network server
   • Italtel IoT platform for sending alerts and for the display of the cable status
   • APP Android for the provisioning of the sensors on site.
2. BENEFITS
   • Reduced cost of the inspections for control the level of the mechanical tension
   • Resilience of the assets avoiding interruptions in the energy supply
3. ITALTEL’S ROLE
   Italtel provides the end-to-end solution, starting from the creation of the Lorawan communication network, from the proprietary IoT platform and the the design of the sensors