Hotline of power engineering specialists:
The temperature overboard is +12, the wind speed is 10 metres per second, power line poles stand up to their full height on the screen of a quadcopter’s heading camera - there is the Tver ground under the rotors. The unmanned aerial vehicle of the Lipetsk branch of IDGC of Centre or, as the power engineers call it, “the conqueror of the skies”, makes its first acquaintance with the territory of large-scale exercises of PJSC Rosseti.
The quadcopter appeared relatively recently in the service of Lipetskenergo, but after a couple of months of survey of the region, the Lipetsk specialists managed to become its professional “pilots”. At the large-scale power engineering exercises, they conduct a training course for Tver colleagues in aviation monitoring of hard-to-reach sites for accurate planning of clearing and widening of ROWs.
The drone is used by ground crews to inspect individual inaccessible poles, determine the possibility of access to them, as well as to inspect some elements of power lines from an angle of view inaccessible from the ground. It is especially indispensable when it comes to massive outages of power grid facilities as a result of adverse meteorological phenomena. In a short time, the quadcopter flies over many kilometres of lines and clearly identifies the locations of grid fault, recording them with high-quality photo and video. Professional photos with incredible panoramas of Tver power lines clearly demonstrate the scale of the work done by the power engineers - clear boundaries of the ROWs from a bird’s eye view.
“For three days of aviation monitoring in the Tver region, the UAV’s mileage was 32 km. It surveyed more than 100 hectares of ROWs in Kalininsky, Konakovsky and Staritsky districts. The time that the drone stands in flight is 30 minutes, but during this period it manages to explore the terrain, which we would have to pass in 2-3 hours. In this sense, the Lipetsk quadcopter significantly saves time for the power engineers in determining the place and scope of work,” noted Oleg Seredkin, the head of the long-term development Office of the branch “Lipetskenergo”.
