ANALYSIS OF PARTIAL DISCHARGE IN ELECTRICAL EQUIPMENT IN INDUSTRIES

One of the failures of the electrical equipment is caused by partial discharge activity in the electrical equipment itself. What is partial discharge? According to the definition of IEEE, partial discharge (PD) is defined as an electrical discharge that only partially bridges the insulation between conductors and that may or may not occur adjacent to a conductor. For instance, an insulator of a conductor may have a dielectric breakdown when the conductor conducts high stress voltage for quite some time. This creates voids in the insulator. Voids such as air or other gas ionizes and creates breakdown pulses across the voids. Time to time the insulator will face progressive deterioration and may lead to catastrophic failure such as flashover or explosion. Partial discharge has been the cause of catastrophic failure in a medium voltage (MV) and high voltage (HV) electrical equipment such as transformer and switchgear. It is very important to for the owners and operators of electrical assets to maintain their electrical utilities at their full function. A need therefore arises to investigate partial discharge activity in electrical equipment of different industries. In this study, partial discharge monitoring will be conducted in two different industry which is an oil and gas company and an electronics company in Malaysia. The technique Transient Earth Voltage (TEV) will be used to the measurement of the partial discharge activity. It is found that the partial discharge activity in oil the oil and gas company is higher than the electronics company because of a certain reason. It is hoped that this study would give awareness about the importance of monitoring partial discharge activity in electrical equipment.