Videomonitoring systems for electric power substation equipments

This work presents a project aimed at the videomonitoring of substation equipments, which resulted in a prototype installed in CTEEP's Bom Jardim substation. Although the system enables monitoring any one of the substation's devices, we decided to use it, in a first moment, to monitor the operation of disconnecting switches in this project, as they exhibit a high failure rate during the switching process. In the case of unassisted substations, CTEEP adopts communication by radio, with a data transmission capacity that is usually very low. This rate imposes limitations to the system in two distinct aspects: (1) the need of an image format with good compression rate, considering that image size is proportional to its quality (and good quality is a must); and (2) reduction in the number of images sent to the operator, limited to the ones that can identify the electric events occurred in the substation.