A High-Precision Insulation Inspection Method Based on the Double-Arm Unbalanced Bridge for Electric Ships

Abstract

In order to ensure the safe navigation of electric ships, it is especially important to detect the insulation status between the ship’s high-voltage system and the ship’s hull in real time. In this paper, a real-time insulation resistance (IR) detection method based on the double-arm unbalanced bridge method was proposed for the problem that the IR calculation results of electric ships have large errors. The detection principle was described, and an experimental test platform was built. The influence law of each branch resistance and voltage on the IR measurement error in this circuit was studied to provide a reference for the parameter selection of the double-arm unbalanced bridge and the effect of temperature on the measurement results was also considered. Besides, the Extended Kalman filtering (EKF) algorithm was used to reduce the influence of voltage fluctuation on the insulation detection error. The results show that the insulation testing method could accurately measure the IR, and the insulation testing error was less than 2.4%, and the error was about 0.18% after processing with the EKF algorithm. This proves that this paper improves the measurement accuracy of IR from three aspects: circuit design of insulation testing, bridge parameter selection and filtering algorithm.