Project background
A utility operator faced high costs and customer impact from ring main unit faults detected only after outages occurred. They required a retrofit system that could identify incipient faults before failure.
Challenge
Medium-voltage environments are electrically noisy and physically constrained. The system had to sense meaningfully — partial discharge, thermal anomalies, load imbalance — without interfering with the RMU itself, and had to justify each alert to dispatch engineers.
Approach & solution
We engineered a sensor pod with partial-discharge, temperature, and current/voltage measurement, feeding an edge analytics unit that classified signatures against known fault patterns. Alerts carried supporting evidence — trend, signature type, and confidence — to make dispatch decisions defensible.
Results & benefits
The system flagged incipient faults in pilot deployments that would otherwise have progressed to outages. Field engineers reported that the evidence attached to each alert made triage fast and reduced false-positive fatigue.
