Haojie Yin

Partial discharge (PD) measurement and its pattern recognition are vital to fault diagnosis of transformers, especially to those traction substation transformers undergoing repetitive traction load shocks. This paper presents the primary factors induced by traction load shocks including high total harmonics distortion (THD), transient voltage impulse and high-temperature rise, and their effects on the feature parameters of PD. Experimental tests are conducted on six artificial PD models with these factors introduced one by one. Results reveal that the maximum PD quantity and the PD repetitive rate are favorable to be enlarged when the oil temperature exceeds 80 °C or the THD is higher than 16% with certain orders of harmonic. The decline in PD inception voltage can mainly be attributed to the transient voltage impulse. The variation in central frequency of the fast Fourier transformation (FFT) spectra transformed from ultra-high frequency signals can mainly be attributed to high THD, especially when it exceeds 20%. The temperature rise has no significant influence on the FFT spectra; the transient voltage impulse, however, can result in a central frequency shift of the floating particle discharge. With the rapid development of high-speed railways, the study presented in this paper will be helpful for field PD detection and recognition of traction substation transformers in the future.

The condition of oil-paper insulation is closely related to the life expectancy of a transformer. The accurate results of oil-paper have not been obtained due to the impact of influencing factors. Therefore, in order to improve the evaluation accuracy of oil-paper insulation, in this paper, oil-paper samples which were prepared with different aging and moisture content were analyzed by frequency domain spectroscopy (FDS). Results show that when the moisture content is less than 2%, the range of 10¹~10³ Hz is mainly affected by moisture and aging has little effect. However, with the increase of moisture content, the effect of aging degree on this band became increasingly prominent. S_m, which represents the integral value from 10⁻¹ to 10⁻³ Hz, and S_DP, which represents the integral value from 10¹ to 10³ Hz, were extracted as characteristic parameters of moisture content and aging degree respectively. Compensation factors γ which represents the influence ratio of moisture on S_DP and φ which represents the influence ratio of aging on S_m were introduced to compensate for the influence of moisture content and aging degree on characteristics respectively. Then, a new method was proposed to evaluate the condition of oil-paper based on compensation factors. Through this method, the influence in characteristics can be eliminated by the obtained actual compensation factors, thus distinguishing the internal influence between moisture content and aging degree on FDS. Finally, this method was verified by field test.