Electrical Breakdown Voltage of Palm Oil and Nano Graphene Filler in Nanofluids Application on Transformer Insulating Oil

Abstract

Generally, power transformers have been using mineral oil as a liquid insulator due to its availability and excellent dielectric property. However, petroleum sources are depleting, which implies that mineral oil is going to be limited in availability. So, this research is to investigate on vegetable oil with nanographene filler as a substitution. Vegetable insulating oil is considered as environment-friendly insulating oil due to their superiority of biodegradable, nature-friendly, high fire-point, and good level of breakdown voltage (BV). Nevertheless, vegetable insulating oil have high viscosity, leading to a slow flow rate on the cooling performance of power transformers. To solve this problem, a process of transesterification was used to produce palm oil methyl ester (POME) from a refined bleached deodorized palm olein (RBDPO) to reduce its viscosity. RBDPO and POME were used as two kinds of fluid-based to combine with graphene nanoparticles (GNPs). Electrical breakdown voltage tests were performed by the IEC60156 standard. The results shown that POME have higher BV than RBDPO but adding GNPs may lead to lower BV even with a small amount of concentration. Nevertheless, every nanofluid has a higher BV than 30 kV.