Recurrent plot analysis of leakage current for monitoring outdoor insulator performance

Outdoor insulators are widely accepted in power industry to maintain electrical insulation ranging from distribution to transmission lines. Such increasing development leads to a lack of appropriate diagnostic tools for assessing the performance of insulator in service, particularly in contaminated conditions. In order to monitor operating performance of contaminated outdoor insulators, a recurrent plot technique is proposed to analyze the leakage current passing through the insulator surface. Contamination tests were conducted in a laboratory by employing heavy salt fog with the deposition of non-soluble contamination. The leakage current was decomposed into different frequency components by using a wavelet transform technique. The temporal sequence of the extracted component was extended to m-dimensional phase space by using a phase-space reconstructed method. The recurrent plot is obtained to show that the topological structure of the high-frequency components is prominent to identify non-linear properties of discharge activities. Based on the analysis of the high-frequency components, the quantitative indicators of recurrent plot are obtained to reflect the underlying mechanism of flashover process. The results obtained indicate that the recurrent plot technique gives visual recurrent patterns of discharge activities for monitoring outdoor insulator performance. The dynamic behaviors on the insulator surface are graphically illustrated on the rectangular block structures with higher density of points. The structure changes indicate the switches of discharge states during the flashover process.