Signal denoising techniques for partial discharge measurements

One of the major challenges of on-site partial discharge (PD) measurements is the recovery of PD signals from a noisy environment. The different sources of noise include thermal or resistor noise added by the measuring circuit, and high-frequency sinusoidal signals that electromagnetically couple from radio broadcasts and/or carrier wave communications. Sophisticated methods are required to detect PD signals correctly. Fortunately, advances in analog-to-digital conversion (ADC) technology, and recent developments in digital signal processing (DSP) enable easy extraction of PD signals. This paper deals with the denoising of PD signals caused by corona discharges. Several techniques are investigated and employed on simulated as well as real PD data.