A new monitor for pollution on power line insulators. Part 1: Design, construction and preliminary tests

Apparatus is developed for monitoring the leakage current drawn by an insulator chain of a power line in a polluted atmosphere. The apparatus senses the leakage current bursts by a novel current transformer arrangement. The apparatus counts the number of bursts, whose amplitude exceeds a critical level, occurring over a preset period. If this number reaches a critical value corresponding to a potentially dangerous intensity of the insulator pollution, the apparatus transmits an alarm signal to the service crew so that they would thus clean the power line insulators in time before a sudden line outage occurs, with the entailed excessive expense, loss of power supply and annoyance to customers. Line insulator cleaning is thus carried out only when necessary, which adds to the economy of the power system operation. The apparatus was designed, built and is currently being tested in the high voltage laboratory of Cairo University. Experience with it on actual power networks will be the subject of another paper.