ITEE Innovation Expo 2008 : Project Details

Investigate and design an on-line transformer monitoring system

Condition monitoring of equipment in the power industry has become an important part in today’s world. Knowing the condition of the equipment in the system can save a lot of money as maintenance can be carried out when needed and faults can be planned for ahead of time. Condition monitoring can be performed either online or offline. Online techniques are those that can be performed while the equipment is in operation. Conversely, equipment must be taken out of operation to perform offline tests. The latter is less desirable as taking equipment offline may cause an outage to the system, which equates to a loss in money. The insulation system of transformers degrades naturally with time and is a significant cause of failures. For this reason it is important to assess the condition of the insulation system in order to prevent these failures. Currently, the only accurate method of doing this is to take the transformer offline and perform tests. A method of finding the condition online through frequency domain spectroscopy is to inject a frequency sweep test signal to the HV side of a transformer, and analysing the leakage current. If a signal is injected at the start of the system, the leakage current can be measured at many transformers, finding the condition of multiple transformers at once. This would require communication between each transformer and the injection source, but could lead to major benefits in the power industry.