Scholarly record

UAV LIDAR APPLICATION FOR ESTIMATING POSSIBILITY FOR ELECTRICAL POWERLINE DAMAGE, DUE TO POTENTIAL TREEFALL

Stefan Vlaykov, Dobromir Filipov, Ivan Ivanov

Abstract

The government electrical company – ESO manages and monitors 16 000 km powerlines in Bulgaria. In this paper the main focus is on monitoring forestry corridors, which are used to provide free of encroachment space for safe electrical power transmission. Those open spaces ensure that no tree or such can be near the conductor enough to cause induction of energy between a tree and a conductor, which is the main reason for wild fires and electrical power shortages. This paper presents a methodology for systematic monitoring of vegetation dynamics specifically in forestry corridors, which are used for powerlines monitoring and maintenance reasons. The result this paper reaches for is adequately assessing the potential risk of treefall causing cut or damage over the conductor due to heavy weather conditions. The proposed method is relying on analyzing LIDAR point clouds, made by using UAV. The workflow relies on precision based aerotriangulation by using Post Process kinematics with base station of known coordinates, classification of point cloud, vectorizing powerlines and calculating distances between lowest tree point and nearest conductor vector. This paper’s main purpose is to develop automatic workflow for encroachment analysis for it to be sufficient and optimal for the practical needs of the government electrical company – ESO EAD.

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