Simulation of Partial Discharge in High Voltage
Power Equipment

Abstract

In high voltage (HV) electrical power system, variety of materials (solid, liquid and gaseous) is used for insulation purpose to protect the incipient failure in HV power equipment. Most of insulating materials are not perfect in all respect and contains always some impurities. The presence of air bubble is one of such impurities in insulating materials and highly undesirable for such type of insulation which causes a local weak zone inside the insulator. Insulation of the HV power equipment gradually degrades inside the insulator due to cumulative effect of electrical, chemical and thermal stress. Due to the high voltage stress the weak zone inside the insulator causes the partial discharge (PD) and finally the insulation properties of such materials is enormously degrades its quality. In this work, an electrical circuit model of void presence inside the solid is used to study the PD activity inside the insulator. A small cylindrical void is taken as impurity inside the solid insulating materials and placed at the middle of this insulator which is kept under uniform electric field using the plane-plane electrode arrangement. In this study an efforts have been made to investigate the maximum PD magnitude, number of PDs and other PD related parameters like PD distribution, frequency content of obtained PD pulse by using phase resolve partial discharge (PRPD) measurement technique. The entire simulation has been done with the MATLAB environment. The entire simulation has been done with the MATLAB environment. In addition, the relationship between the induced charge and void parameter is discussed for cylindrical void.