Tomonori Nishida

An Optically-Interrogated Rogowski Coil for Passive, Multiplexable Current Measurement

We report on the design and implementation of a novel hybrid electro-optical sensor for the measurement of electric current. A fibre Bragg grating is utilized to passively interrogate an air-cored coil via a low-voltage piezoelectric multilayer stack. Peak Bragg reflections are strain-tuned by the Rogowski coil/piezoelectric transducer combination, allowing primary current reconstruction to be performed remotely and without active electronics at the sensor. The preliminary embodiment demonstrates long-distance, passive measurement of current for metering and protection relaying applications, and retains the fiber transducers capability for serial multiplexing.

Distributed photonic instrumentation for power system protection and control

We report on recent developments in hybrid optical protection schemes that make use of passive fiber Bragg grating-based transducers for the distributed measurement of voltage and current. In addition to the details of the hybrid optical sensor technology, and its full integration with a commercial busbar protection relay, we report on the first-time laboratory demonstration of a centralized three-ended unit protection scheme featuring hybrid optical sensors capable of passive and wide-area coverage. Furthermore, we discuss the impact of this technology on present and future protection applications that may be improved or enabled by the proposed scheme.