A Fast Method of Railway Signal Cable Fault Location Based on SFT

Abstract:
The damage of cable protection layer may cause short circuit and open circuit faults, which endanger the safe operation of the train. Cables are generally laid underground, in order to reduce the workload of fault location, spread spectrum time domain reflectometry (SSTDR) method is an effective means to detect the fault points of railway signal cables. When using embedded processors for fault location, the correlation processes in SSTDR needs a large amount of calculation. A low-complexity location method is desired. According to the sparsity of correlation results in SSTDR method, this paper proposes a method to improve SSTDR by using sparse Fourier transform (SFT) theory, which can save computing resources effectively. The method is tested on the MATLAB, and the simulation result verify the validity of the method. Experiments are carried out on cables with different fault distances. The experiments results show the effectiveness of the method.