NHR is highlighting an underground cable monitoring application in the Netherlands, designed to help a power network operator spot hidden cable abnormalities before they turn into service disruption.
Surfacing problems no one can see
Buried beneath roads and green strips, underground cable shows no outward sign in the early stages of a fault — by the time a trip or outage occurs, excavation costs and supply impact can no longer be avoided. Temperature is the most telling leading indicator, as joint degradation or poor heat dissipation typically appears first as a slow local temperature climb.
The NHR solution places dual-point temperature sensing nodes at key locations along the cable corridors, tracking two measurement points at once and comparing their difference and trend to separate one-off fluctuations from sustained abnormalities. Readings travel over LoRaWAN to G09 industrial gateways and on to the IoT platform, so scattered locations need no dedicated communications lines.
Moving maintenance from repair to prevention
Each monitored point carries its own thresholds and trend alerts: a climb beyond the normal range notifies the maintenance team, allowing servicing to be scheduled before a fault takes shape. Hidden cable abnormalities gained a continuous observation channel for the first time, while per-circuit consumption on the distribution side became individually traceable — with peak load and abnormal usage presented visually, giving both network maintenance and energy-efficiency decisions a footing in data.