Partial discharge on-line monitoring of outdoor insulators

The main objective of this study is to investigate the feasibility of using an RF antenna to detect partial discharges in outdoor insulators. Moreover, the study focuses on identifying the sources of partial discharge using artificial neural networks. In outdoor insulators, partial discharges could be initiated either from surface discharge due to pollution and/or from corona discharges from energized ends. Both statistical and spectral features have been used as an input vector to a feed forward neural network with back propagation training algorithm. The proposed method is found to be successful in classifying different types of partial discharge with a recognition accuracy of 93%. The proposed method can be used during overhead line inspection to assess the status of outdoor non-ceramic insulators.