Heating cables, widely used in office buildings, factories, streets and railways, deteriorate in electrical insulation during operation. The insulation deterioration of heating cables leads to electric discharges that can cause electrical fires. With this background, this paper dealt with a condition monitoring technique for heating cables by the analysis of discharge signals to prevent electrical fires. Insulation deterioration was simulated using an arc generator specified in UL1699 under AC operation, and the characteristic and propagation of discharge signals were analyzed on a 100 meter-long heating cable. Discharge signals produced by insulation deterioration were detected as a voltage pulse because they are as small as a few mV and they are attenuated through propagation path.The frequency spectrum of discharge signals mainly existed in the range from 70 kHz to 110 kHz, and the maximum attenuation of the signal was 84.8% at 100 meters away from the discharge point. Based on the experimental results, a monitoring device, which is composed of a high pass filter with the cut-off frequency of 70 kHz, a comparator, a wave shaper and a microprocessor, was designed and fabricated. Also, an algorithm was designed to discriminate the discharge signal in the presence of noise, compared with the pulse repetition period and the number of pulse counts per 100ms. In the experiment, the result showed that the prototype monitoring device could detect and discriminate the discharge signals produced at every discharge point on a heating cable.

Electronic systems based on solid state devices have changed to be more complicated and miniaturized as the electronic systems developed. If the electronic systems are exposed to HPEM (high power electromagnetics), the systems will be destroyed by the coupling effects of electromagnetic waves. Because the HPEM has fast rise time and high voltage of the pulse, the semiconductors are vulnerable to external stress factor such as the coupled electromagnetic pulse. Therefore, we will discuss about malfunction behavior and DFR (destruction failure rate) of the semiconductor caused by amplitude and repetition rate of the pulse. For this experiment, the pulses were injected into the pins of general purpose IC due to the fact that pulse injection test enables the phenomenon after the HPEM is coupled to power cables. These pulses were produced by pulse generator and their characteristics are 2.1 [ns] of pulse width, 1.1 [ns] of pulse rise time and 30, 60, 120 [Hz] of pulse repetition rate. The injected pulses have changed frequency, period and duty ratio of output generated by Timer IC. Also, as the pulse repetition rate increases the breakdown threshold point of the timer IC was reduced.