Non-Destructive Testing in Complexes Cabling Networks using Time Domain Reflectometry and Particle Swarm Optimization

area of research, dealing with diagnostic and monitoring the health of the electrical transmission networks and find automatically the failures. One of the recently developped (NDT) techniques is Time Domain Reflectometry methods, they are quite efficient for detecting important damages (hard faults), such as short or open-circuits. Interpreting the results obtained with reflectometry instrument for a wiring network requires great expertise, as the reflectometry response can be very complex. Morever, the reflectometry response it self is not self-sufficient to identify and localate the defects in cabling networks. There is the need to solve efficiently the inverse problem which consists of deducing some knowledge about the defects from the response at the input point of the network. In this paper, TDR and PSO algorithm have been combined and applied to produce a new sufficiently optimized method that permit the extaraction of damages informations from the time domain reflectograms. Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) method has been used to produce a training data set with the known of damages. The results obtained from the TDR-PSO algorithm confirmed the theoretical predictions, and gave us exact informations about the complexe structure's health.