A trial of simple and easy health monitoring for power poles by using ‘ipod’

Abstract

At present, the regular inspection of power poles is just a visual inspection based on the inspector’s experience. Thus, overlook of the deteriorated poles can come off. In order to avoid an accident due to the overlook of the deteriorated poles, the authors propose a simple and easy health monitoring method for power poles using ‘iPod’. Since the applicability of ‘iPod’ as a vibration sensor in this purpose was not clear, it was examined in the following procedure. First, the authors proposed a tool to fix the ‘iPod’ to a power pole, and the performance of ‘iPod’ as a vibration measurement device was compared with a conventional acceleration sensor. As a result, it was confirmed that ‘iPod’ could give almost the same response with the conventional sensor in terms of the observed predominant frequency. Next, vibration measurements were conducted at power poles in a field. As a result, the observed predominant frequency corresponded to the calculated 2nd natural frequency of power poles. Although some power poles were supported by some additional wires from the ground, the measurements were successful at almost all the sites. Hence, the authors confirmed that the ‘iPod’ based health monitoring is possible.