Experience of testing polymeric HV cable systems by an innovative partial discharge measurement approach

An innovative system has recently been proposed for partial discharge (PD) measurements which can acquire a significant amount of PD pulses and then process the information not only with respect to pulse amplitude and phase of occurrence but also with respect to pulse frequency and time spectra. The two striking features of this system are i) the possibility to separate pulses coming from different PD source typologies (efficiently rejecting noise), building up patterns relevant to each pulse source; and ii) the use of artificial intelligence techniques, based on robust statistical quantities and fuzzy logic algorithms, which can provide an enhanced tool for PD phenomena identification and risk assessment. The results obtained when applying this innovative system to site tests on HV polymeric cable systems are presented and discussed in this paper, emphasizing the enhanced capability of the proposed measurement approach to detect and identify PD sources.