A study of the sweep frequency impedance method and its application in the detection of internal winding short circuit faults in power transformers

Undetected short circuit faults are a significant problem in power transformers and can eventually develop into catastrophic faults. At present, frequency response analysis (FRA) is one of the well-recognized diagnostic tools for the detection of winding faults, but it has some limitations, such as a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and instability caused by changes in the measuring voltage. In this paper, a novel method called sweep frequency impedance (SFI) is proposed to address the difficulties that arise from FRA. Based on the mechanism of this new method, a nondestructive testing system was established to demonstrate the advantages of SFI measurements. The SFI test system has a better stability, repeatability, and SNR by comparing it with the FRA test system. Moreover, FRA and SFI curves obtained under the same conditions was symmetrical about a specific straight line above 10 kHz, and the SFI value at 50 Hz is equivalent to the short circuit impedance (SCI) value of a transformer. These results indicate that the existing criteria of FRA and SCI methods can be used in the SFI method to detect transformer faults. Finally, the experiments on a special oil-immersed testing transformer demonstrate that the SFI detection system is feasible, sufficiently sensitive to detect short circuit faults and able to quantify the level of the fault.