Contractors and Maintenance Crews

Whether it’s a maintenance crew working to reduce downtime, an operations manager desperate to get a high-value asset back online or an electrical contractor trying to solve a recurring fault, the benefit of LiveWire’s SSTDR can be easily and effectively realized with its line of handled and installable products that address the need for safety, security, and reliability.

Detect, locate and diagnose problems

Handheld LiveWire testers for use by maintenance crews working in harsh operating environments and on complex equipment allows for live cable and wire testing to detect, locate and help diagnoses the problems.  In aerospace and rail, the classic “No Fault Found” dilemma is addressed with the ability to test on powered systems and to locate events.  

Electrical contractors for the first time can detect the type of fault and locate the position of an electrical “event” that causes intermittent or persistent circuit breaker trips, thus giving the critical information needed to reduce call backs for circuit breaker trips.

Power cable fault detection

Monitor, detect and location shorts, opens and hard to find intermittent faults on energized or unenergized cables

Like embedded solutions being designed in by end-equipment makers for all types of harsh and mission critical applications, LiveWire’s handheld and installable products offer the same type of new TDR that allows for testing on live wires and cables.  Monitor, detect and location shorts, opens and hard to find intermittent faults on energized or unenergized cables within feet of accuracy.  LiveWire’ patented Spread Spectrum TDR uses tiny signals and long pseudorandom codes to “see” into live systems without interrupting the  host signal.

Typical applications for handheld products includes troubleshoot of aging aircraft wiring to reduce downtime.  Equipment downtime costs the transportation industry millions of dollars in lost revenue every year. Internal wiring related issues are a major cause of such downtime and pose a hidden hazard. Maintenance technicians spend considerable man-hours repairing wiring problems, with the most time spent troubleshooting, isolating, and locating faults. Many of these wiring issues go unresolved, resulting in repeat in operation problems and false line-replaceable unit (LRU) removals, costing an even greater amount of time and money.

Capture time and distance to Opens, Shorts and Arc Faults

LiveWire’s Fault Trapper allows Electrical contractors unattended monitoring of energized dedicated circuits for hard to catch or detect intermittent conditions. Once quickly installed in a circuit breaker, press the Test button to begin monitoring and walk away. Come back later or the next day to find out the why-when-and-where’s of circuit breaker trips.  Fault Trapper is a first of its kind tester using SSTDR to monitor live circuits. Running on in-line power for extended battery life, it captures time and distance to Opens, Shorts and Arc Faults saving the event information in memory for later investigation. The in-line 40 Amp Module isolates the circuit being monitored from the breaker panel and all other breakers. The last faults can be viewed off-line using the back-up battery.

Aeronautic cable fault finding

Embedded Solutions

LiveWire’s sensor ‘engines’ in the form of fully engineered, credit-card sized printed circuit boards and multi-board stacks, as well as SSTDR chip-sets with corresponding reference designs for very high-volume applications.

LiveWire can work with most communications and control options.  Update and reporting interfaces that can be used include serial, USB, JTAG, Ethernet and others. Board-level solutions can support several other communications protocols including, SPI, I2C and CAN.

Handheld Solutions

Fully housed sensor modules for permanent installation. Handheld products using LiveWire’s Spread Spectrum brand of TDR for maintenance, field testing and electrical contractor markets.

The Mantis™ LW-MM200 is the first live cable tester module that monitors energized cable run faults and electrical circuits around-the-clock.

Fault Trapper monitors live circuits for intermittent conditions to record time and distance to Opens, Shorts and Arc Faults.

Dual mode TDR for testing and monitoring energized and unenergized systems.

Power Prowler

3-In-1 DMM/TDR Cable Fault Finder

FaultChaser Handheld

Fault Finding/Cable Length Measurement TDR