Experimental Results of Partial Discharge Localization in Bounded Domains

This work presents a novel diagnostic method to localize Partial Discharges (PDs) inside Medium Voltage (MV) and High Voltage (HV) equipment. The method is well suited for that equipment presenting a bounded domain with fixed Boundary Conditions (BCs) such as Oil-Filled Power Transformers (OFPTs), Air Insulated Switchgears (AISs), Gas Insulated Switchgears (GISs) or Gas Insulated Transmission Lines (GILs). It is based on Electromagnetic (EM) measurements which are used to reconstruct the EM field produced by the PD and localize the PD itself. The reconstruction and localization tasks are based on the eigenfunctions series expansion method which intrinsically accounts for the physical information of the propagation phenomenon. This fact makes the proposed diagnostic method very robust and accurate even in real and complex scenarios. The promising experimental results, obtained in two different test cases, confirmed the ability and powerfulness of the proposed PD localization method.