Optimal Sensor Placement for Contactless Medium- or High-Voltage Measurement

The paper presents a method for selecting the locations of field sensors under a medium- or high-voltage line or substation busbars, in a contactless voltage measurement system. The proposed method uses the condition number of a distance matrix, correlated with the capacitance matrix of a system, as an optimization criterion. As a robust optimization algorithm was expected to be necessary for this task, genetic algorithm and particle swarm optimization algorithm have been tested, both in regular and hybrid versions. The proposed method was tested in simulations, using four power line geometries based on real-life pylons. Optimization results were juxtaposed with reference values coming from a sensor placement that would most probably be selected by a human operator when not using optimization. The proposed method offers significantly better (although still not good) conditioning of a system equation compared to reference placements. The results also provide an interesting insight into the influence of popular line geometries on numerical properties (and thus one component of uncertainty) of a contactless measurement system.