Study for the Condition Monitoring and Status Assessment of Optical fiber composite low-voltage cable

OPLC is an important facility in the power fiber-to-the-home project, and it is an important means to achieve deep integration of power grid and communication network infrastructure. The OPLC temperature is closely related to the lifetime of the composite cable. The paper firstly analyzed important reasons for the temperature’s varying with cable surface of an OPLC core, and proposed that the oxidation of an insulating material such as XLPE is caused by the thermal aging, electrical aging, and photo aging of composite cable material with high temperature. With these results, the paper raised a technology for OPLC on-line condition monitoring and its safe state assessment, which uses the distributed temperature and current sensors to extract the on-line state parameters of the composite cable, and uses the internal and external temperature characteristics to evaluate the safe operation state of the OPLC. These temperature characteristics of the OPLC composite cable were further verified in the aging test of the composite cable. The method proposed in this paper can help the operation and maintenance staff to master the operation status of OPLC, scientifically develop equipment maintenance plans, and ensure network security.