Time growing frequency sweep signal based insulation condition monitoring in frequency domain spectroscopy

Abstract

When an alternating voltage is applied to a dielectric material, dipoles in the material try to align in the direction of the applied voltages and polarization process starts. For multi-dielectric media especially in which a liquid interface is involved, such as oilpaper insulation, interfacial polarization is predominantly active among all polarization processes. This interfacial polarization is a very slow process and is effective in lower frequency range. This interfacial polarization reflects the inherent condition of the oilpaper insulation. Due to this reason, frequency domain spectroscopy is performed in lower frequency range to assess the condition of oil-paper insulation. So, the time required for frequency response measurement using conventional frequency domain spectroscopy is quite long. Considering the aforesaid facts, a different procedure has been taken here to measure the dielectric response in a significantly lesser time keeping the entire frequency range of conventional frequency domain spectroscopy. Instead of using pure sinusoidal excitation voltages over wide frequency range, dielectric response current has been measured using excitation having time growing frequency sweep (TGFS) signal. For this purpose, test samples that emulate the oil-paper insulation of real-life transformer have been prepared in the laboratory. The moisture contents of the test samples have been kept different to investigate the reliability of the proposed method. A setup has been made in the laboratory to measure dielectric response currents using the both excitations. In order to investigate the applicability of the proposed method, experiment has also been performed on actual transformers. It has been observed that the use of excitation signal having time growing frequency sweep provides almost similar information regarding insulation condition as obtained by the use of conventional sinusoidal excitation voltages. Hence, the proposed method is capable of reduction in time in FDS nearly by an amount of 85%.