Hotspot Temperature Monitoring of Fully Insulated Busbar Taped Joint

Abstract

The fully insulated busbar has been extensively used in power and shipboard applications due to its favorable economic efficiency and excellent performance. Because of contact resistance and larger insulation thermal resistance, the joint, in certain circumstances, form a hotspot in the circuit. For hotspot temperature monitoring, therefore, this paper proposed an indirect approach which consists of radial direction temperature calculation (RDTC) in the busbar and axial direction temperature calculation (ADTC) in the conductor. The RDTC is to calculate the conductor temperatures from the surface temperatures of busbar in two different spots near the joint through the transient thermal network. The ADTC is to estimate the hotspot temperature from the conductor temperatures obtained in the RDTC using a fitted functional expression. The influence of solar radiation on the temperature distribution is greatly reduced by averaging the surface temperature in the RDTC and adjusting the functional form in the ADTC. A temperature-rise test on a practical insulated busbar taped joint was performed outdoors in hot summer to validate this approach. The calculated hotspot temperature agrees well with the measured result with a maximum error of only 3.8 K, indicating the high model precision and strong robustness to the solar radiation impact. Some factors in the applications of temperature monitoring are also discussed. This method is expected to be applied to the engineering application, thus improving the condition monitoring of the fully insulated busbar.