A defect location method for power cable based on Burg power spectral

The frequency‐domain reflection (FDR) has been demonstrated to be a trustworthy technique in solving the defect location of power cable by field experiments. However, the location spectrum of the FDR requires manual window smoothing and can be disturbed by spurious peaks. Aiming at these shortcomings of FDR, a new method of cable defect location based on Burg power spectral (BPS) is introduced in this paper. The idea of this method is to use linear difference variance to fit the distribution of reflection coefficient spectrum and build an auto‐regressive (AR) model. The Burg algorithm is employed to estimate the coefficients model and calculate the power distribution of the AR model. Then, the cable defects will be located by BPS with high precision and resolution. In this method, the fast Fourier transform (FFT) with windowed function is replaced by an AR model without windowed function. This suppressed the impact of spurious peaks or spectrum leakage in FFT on the localization defects, and the localization resolution is higher. Finally, we validate the feasibility and effectiveness of BPS through experiments conducted on a 500 m laboratory cable and a 9.6 km submarine cable.