Overhead Transmission Line Thermographic Inspection Using a Drone

Thermovision is a technique used to measure an object temperature. A drone equipped with such technology will provide an ability to solve the problems in particular related to overheating of the components of the transmission line (focus on a conductor) as well as throughput capacity issues. The proposed simplified inspection system ensures aerial thermal imaging under particular weather conditions and power line loading. The solution provides safe, high quality and cost-effective examination of the overhead power lines in the remote and flexible way. The system consists of two parts: hardware and software design. Hardware part combines drone and thermal camera circuit in order to capture and transmit the required data. Software part includes interpretation of the received data (thermal photo) and calculations of the throughput current of a power line. The verification and validation results are presenting in a paper by considering a particular case study.