Ampacimon develops innovative « Dynamic Line Rating » (DLR) systems for transmission and distribution energy systems operators.
Dynamic Line Rating is a new technology belonging to the « smart grid » world of innovations designed to actively manage electricity grids. It consists of stand-alone inductively powered (no batteries) sensors installed on high-voltage lines, wirelessly connected to a remote software data acquisition and analysis platform. The computation engines of this platform aggregate also third party information, like for instance weather forecast information, and the results can be directly embedded into the energy management systems (EMS/SCADA) of utilities’ dispatching centres.
The system continuously monitors the key parameters influencing the maximum thermal capacity of an electrical line: electrical load, temperature, wind speed and solar radiation. It measures the so-called «ampacity» of a line, i.e. its true, real-time maximum capacity (which is usually significantly higher than its design capacity). This system also allows to reliably forecast this capacity up to two days in advance.
Dekimo Experts provided assistance for the electronic development and to select suitable performance components at affordable cost, in the context of challenging timeline constraints. Some innovative ideas of the Dekimo group were also implemented like the selection of communication antennas on the main signal processing board in order to decrease the cost while maintaining a similar signal quality. The currently available competing solutions have bulky antennas, which are more expensive and more sensitive to electrical discharges. Given the high-voltage environment this would significantly decrease the lifetime of these systems.
Dekimo Experts has helped Ampacimon to meet the project objectives in terms of financial targets, knowledge and project deadline. We also helped to improve the reliability of the system through better components selection giving the product a lower failure rate, without sacrificing on the requirements set nor system performance.
