Abstract
Partial discharges (PD) are the most common and harmful threat to the health of electrical insulation of high voltage (HV) and high field (HF) equipment. The occurrence of PD activity in HV and MV equipment is at the same time a cause and a sign of insulation degradation that may eventually result in the breakdown of the HV power equipment. For the safe and reliable operation of HV power equipment, continuous PD monitoring needs to be conducted conveniently to prevent any unplanned power outages and damage to electrical power equipment. The ultra-high frequency (UHF) PD measurement method has been widely used as an effective technique to detect PD activity on HV power equipment due to its non-invasive principle. To enable PD detection accuracy, there is still a need for more sensitive PD sensors that can assist the UHF PD monitoring system by suppressing ambient background noise and low-frequency electromagnetic interferences from telecommunication such as GSM signals. To tackle the sensitivity issues, this article presents a new design of ultra-wideband (UWB) microstrip patch antenna that is capable of effective suppression of low-frequency interference signals. The proposed antenna, designed, simulated, and optimized using the CST Microwave Studio software, has a bandwidth of 3.3GHz, below -10dB, in the operating frequency range of 1.2GHz-4.5GHz. The prototype of this antenna, printed on an FR4 substrate of a thickness of 1.6mm and a dielectric constant of 4.4, featuring a compact size of 100mm <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\times100$ </tex-math></inline-formula> mm <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\times1.6$ </tex-math></inline-formula> mm, was implemented to detect PD through laboratory experiments. This paper shows that the designed UWB antenna has high sensitivity, good noise rejection and it is, therefore, a promising candidate sensor for PD detection on HV equipment.
Highlights
Insulation systems play a vital role in the safe delivery of electrical power
The failure of insulation may cause the unplanned breakdown of the high voltage (HV) and medium voltage (MV) power equipment, possibly involving explosion and fire that may cause injuries to the people in the vicinity of HV and MV equipment [1], [2]
Partial discharges (PD) may incept when there is a cavity inside insulation when there is contamination and/or tangential field gradient on the surface of the insulator or when there is a protrusion near a high voltage conductor [3]
Summary
Insulation systems play a vital role in the safe delivery of electrical power. the failure of insulation may cause the unplanned breakdown of the high voltage (HV) and medium voltage (MV) power equipment, possibly involving explosion and fire that may cause injuries to the people in the vicinity of HV and MV equipment [1], [2]. The additional soldering material (lead) has different characteristics from the copper used on the radiating patch and ground plane of the antenna, which, in turn, may cause the shift in resonance frequencies between the simulation and measurement results of the designed antenna. The overall bandwidth of the designed antenna is 3.4GHz, below −10dB over the operating frequency range from 1GHz to 4.4GHz. 2) MEASUREMENT OF VOLTAGE STANDING WAVE RATIO OF THE DESIGNED ANTENNA The VSWR is an important parameter that indicates how well the radiated waves will propagate through the transmission line (coaxial cable) without being stationary or reflected back to the source. The designed antenna from simulation and VNA measurement experiments is less than 2, which, as mentioned, confirms that the designed antenna is suitable for high-sensitivity PD pulse detection. [21]
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