Location of Wire Faults Using Chaotic Signal

Abstract

We propose a method for testing wire fault using a chaotic signal. The fault is detected by correlating the chaotic signal back-reflected from the fault with its delayed duplicate. Centimeter-level spatial resolution and antijamming can be achieved, benefiting from the broadband and randomness of the chaotic waveform. We experimentally proved that our method can be used to locate the impedance discontinuities of several different kinds of electric cables. Preliminary experiments obtained 0.5-m resolution with a data acquisition bandwidth of 120 MHz. Further, we demonstrate the ability for testing live wires using our method.