Electrical infrastructures shall be available 24/7, either because, like substations, they supply power to thousands of homes, or because, like overhead powerlines, they power trains which transports hundreds of people at rush hours.
A substation
An overhead powerline with a catenary
Such infrastructures are regularly inspected and maintained to ensure the required level of availability. However, some defects might be hard to detect and will eventually lead to a service disruption. This is particularly true for defects such as electrical discharge or Corona effect, which affect electrical components exposed to dust, humidity and solar radiation. The combination of those three environmental troublemakers slowly causes permanent damages on insulators. At some point, the conductive part of the electrical cables will be in direct contact with the air and will lead to an ionization of the surrounding air (Corona effect) and finally to electrical discharges. Those phenomena produce very low light emission in the UltraViolet (UV) spectrum, which can be detected by ultra-sensitive sensors such as Photonis iNocturn SUV.
SUV camera : iNocturn’s specifications
Photonis unique solution, the iNocturn SUV camera, combines a Photonis scientific grade deep UV image intensifier tube (IIT) with the Nocturn, a camera built around Photonis low light Lynx CMOS.