Development of a digital acquisition system for partial discharge measurement and analyses

A typical set of partial discharges (PD) occurring in insulation systems can be characterized by a three dimensional plot of their phase dasiaphipsila on the power line cycle, apparent charge magnitude dasiaqpsila and the number of pulses dasianpsila. A digital acquisition system is being developed which can measure dasiaphipsila and dasiaqpsila values of dasianpsila PD's occurring on a given power line voltage and then plot n(phi, q). The system is developed using the data acquisition card NI-5112, which is a 2-channel high speed digitizer (100 MS/s) with the acquisition and analyses programs written in LabVIEW 8.2. The system is being tested using artificially generated PD pulses which have variable dasiaphipsila and dasiaqpsila magnitudes and their performance benchmarked by comparing the resulting plots with the plots obtained by processing the same data on existing PD analyses system called TECHIMP-PD check.