Abstract
Flashover on transmission line insulators is one of the major causes of line outages due to contamination from the environment or ageing. Power utility companies practicing predictive maintenance are currently exploring novel non-contact methods to monitor insulator surface discharge activities to prevent flashover. This paper presents an investigation on the UV pulse signals detected using UV pulse sensor due to the discharges on the insulator surfaces under varying contamination levels and insulator ages. Unaged and naturally aged insulators (0 to >20 years) were artificially contaminated (none, light to heavy contamination). The electrical stresses on the insulator surfaces were varied to generate varying discharge intensity levels on the surfaces of the insulator. The DC and harmonic components of UV pulse signals detected during surface discharges were recorded and analysed. Results show a positive correlation between the discharge intensity level of contaminated and aged transmission insulators with the DC and harmonic components of the UV pulse signals. Furthermore, the study revealed that under dry insulator surface conditions, insulator ageing has a more profound effect during discharges than contamination level. The findings from this study suggest that the use of UV pulse sensors to monitor UV pulse signals emitted during insulator surface discharges can be another novel non-contact method of monitoring transmission line insulator surface conditions.
Highlights
Discharge detection methods for condition monitoring/maintenance of transmission line insulators are widely used and have shown to be effective and reliable
The output of the UV Pulse (UVP) sensor was connected to a PicoScope so that the UV pulse signals could be captured by the Personal Computer (PC), which is connected to the output of the PicoScope
The DC and harmonic components of UV pulse signals detected using a UV pulse sensor due to the discharges on dry insulator surfaces under varying contamination levels, and insulator ages have been investigated in the work
Summary
Discharge detection methods for condition monitoring/maintenance of transmission line insulators are widely used and have shown to be effective and reliable. Discharges on insulators occur if their surfaces are contaminated or become less hydrophobic due to various environmental factors at the vicinity of a line [1]. These environmental factors lower the insulator surface resistance leading to a higher flow of leakage current. If this phenomenon exacerbates, a flashover could occur that can lead to an outage. There has been more focus on non-contact methods of monitoring insulator surfaces for convenience and reliability Such methods include acoustic, thermal [2,5,6], UV intensity, infrared [7,8], etc
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