A New Method for Cable AC Voltage Test of Insulation Based on Replacing Test Reactor Combination by Shunt Reactor

Abstract

The large-scale usage of power cables plays an important role in ensuring the reliability of production and domestic electricity. The AC voltage test of insulation should be conducted before the cable is put into operation, and usually the frequency conversion series resonance method shall be adopted. With the increase of cable voltage level and distance, the number and capacity of test reactors also increase greatly, thus a test method using the shunt reactor instead of the test reactor is proposed in this paper. Considering the voltage and frequency requirements of cable AC voltage test, the voltage withstand level of terminal and neutral point of shunt reactor, magnetic density distribution of iron core and other limiting factors, a variety of different test connection modes and test programme are proposed. The new method is verified in the power cable project in the northeast suburb of Xi’an, China. The test result shows that the method is effective and feasible, and the test power capacity demand, test floor space and time of this method are significantly reduced compared with the traditional method.