Thermal monitoring of transformers

With the efforts being done to make the existing power network smarter and efficient, thermal monitoring of transformers has become the demand of the day in the field of transformer engineering. Theoretical methods available and practical measurement techniques will not suffice, hence the development of thermal modeling techniques that can measure the thermal profile across the transformer at desired instant of time will have to be a solution in this direction. This paper presents a thermal model based on FEM technique and circuit modeling that can calculate the thermal profile across the transformer geometry at any instant, given the input of the loading conditions at that instant. The model has been tested on an industrial transformer and the results obtained are compared with the practical measured data for that transformer.