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Electric Arc detection system

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victorpbr

Mechanical
Oct 13, 2014
74
Hi,

I have a industrial ozone generation system, composed of 800 corona discharge lamps. They operate at 35 kV and the current in each lamp is of about 40 mA.

Due to environmental conditions, occasionally an electric arc occurs between the metallic outer surface of the lamp and some other metal part of the system. This is is a factor that is hard to control, due to dust, umidity etc.

When this electric arc occurs, the high current causes the protection system to cut power for all the system. What I'm looking for is a simple and cheap solution to identify in which lamp the electric arc originated from. Ideally, what I'd like would be a low voltage/current signal so I can read it from a microcontroller and display the faulty lamp. Any ideas on how could I get this signal on this situation?

Kind regards,

Victor
 
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Unless every lamp has a separate power supply electronic detection would not be possible without somehow isolating the individual bulb circuits from the others so a voltage drop on a specific bulb would be detectable.

Consider using a video camera. Probably a stock surveillance system would work fine since everything should be visually static until an arc occurs, then the 'motion detection' feature should trigger on any arc. Based on the bulb grid layout it shouldn't be too hard to locate the origin. A bulb going out would also be alarmed.

Keith Cress
kcress -
 
simple and cheap solution ......
Seems like a stretch for 800 lamps. I would consider using small current transformers and feed that into a micro after being rectified. The wire through the transformer could have built up insulation and signal rectified. A cheap micro has 16 analog inputs. that could resolve the issue to a bank of 50. That may be useful. Monitoring 800 individually gets rather complex.
 
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