Palm Oil as the Cooling Liquid in Single Phase Transformer for Better Efficiency

Abstract

The important purpose of mineral oil in transformer is to be insulant and it is role of being a coolant. Petroleum based oil is commonly used because it has a good dielectric strength and cooling performance. However, the application of mineral oil brings negative impact to the environment such as oil spills, leakage, explosion and soon petroleum based oil will be running out for future generation used. Thus, vegetable oil is chosen as an alternative to replace mineral oil for transformer insulation liquid. Formerly, most of Malaysian researches were focusing on the properties of the vegetable oils rather than investigate the effect on the transformer performances after the vegetable oils are applied. Hence, this paper focuses on the performance of the transformer before and after vegetable oils are applied. For this paper, refined palm oil is used as insulation liquid for a single-phase step down transformer which use the 220 V supply and 50 Hz frequency. Transformer is connected to 110V induction motor as load and has been test in two conditions, dry and after palm oil is applied. Comparison is made from both results and clearly shown a good improvement when palm oil is used as insulation oil.