All Fiber Electro-Optical Voltage Sensor for Electrical Switchgear

An all-fiber optic electric field sensor for measuring voltage on an indoor switchgear phase conductor bus bar, comprising:

• a single mode laser transmitter which emits constant power at a calibrated center wavelength, connected to a direct current power supply featuring an adjustable modulation rate;
• an optical connection from said optical transmitter to a passive polarization filtering module, comprised of a linear 45° degree in-line all fiber optic polarizer, which produces linearly polarized orthogonal in-phase modes of equal amplitude;
• an all dielectric single mode fiber optic current sensing cable, routed within an all dielectric rigid insulating conduit, which is secured in parallel with a phase conductor bus bar with an insulated mechanical support bracket with an integrated vibration damper, at an input of said fiber optic voltage sensor cable, which receives an output from said linear 45° polarizer module, and where said fiber optic electric field sensor cable traverses a path perpendicular to an electric field radiating from said bus bar, while maintaining a parallel orientation with respect to said phase conductor bus bar and a ground bus connected to a switchgear ground grid, and where an output of said fiber optic electric field sensor cable, which defines a length of the electric field sensor cable and conduit within the switchgear, and an effective electro-optical interaction path length, relative to the input, is secured with a second mechanical support bracket featuring vibration dampers inside a switchgear cubicle where said fiber optic electric field sensor cable is routed;
• a passive polarization filtering module, which analyzes a phase-shifted polarized optical output, comprising a polarization maintaining 1×2 splitter with 50:50 optical power distribution, where a first half of the divided signal is transmitted through a right circular polarizing filter, and a second half is transmitted through a left circular polarizing filter;
• a photo-detector module, comprised of photodiodes which produce an output current proportional to the incident optical intensity transmitted orthogonally from said right and left circular polarizing filters, and where a difference in observed optical intensity magnitudes is proportional to the phase shift of the linearly polarized modes which occurs during traversal of the fiber optical voltage sensing cable on an optical path perpendicular to the electric field radiating from the phase conductor bus bar where voltage is being observed, where said phase shift resulting from electro-optically induced linear birefringence varies exponentially with the electric field potential which radiates from said bus bar as an inverse function of linear distance from said electric field, modulated by the standardized Kerr constant of the electro-optical single mode voltage sensor cable;
• and, communication ports from said photo-detector module which transmit an electrically transduced optical phase shift observed at the polarization filtering analyzer module to a digital microprocessor relay back plane for SCADA network integration.