A Novel System and Experimental Verification for Locating Partial Discharge in Gas Insulated Switchgears

Partial discharge location in gas insulated switchgears is important for timely identifying incipient problem and taking remedial actions to prevent later catastrophic breakdowns. This paper presents a new system including sensing terminals and hand-held intelligent terminals to locate partial discharge. Sensing terminals, housing the sensors, are attached to outside enclosure walls of the switchgear to collect acoustic signals, which are transmitted wirelessly to the hand-held terminals. The acoustic vibration caused by the discharge will propagate from the source, resulting in the highest intensity at the sensor closest to the discharge. By examining the signal signatures of the distributed sensors, the location of the partial discharge can be derived. The system is applied in both staged simulation environment and actual factory high voltage tests. The results have demonstrated that the system developed is highly effective in locating partial discharge in gas insulated switchgears and is suitable for practical applications.