Fault Diagnosis of On-Load Tap-Changer in Converter Transformer Based on Time–Frequency Vibration Analysis

The suitable condition of an on-load tap-changer (OLTC) is essential for the operation of converter transformer due to its frequent switch for the voltage regulation of power system. This paper describes a methodology to obtain the OLTC vibration characteristics in time-frequency domain. Considering the possible aliasing effect in vibration signal processing, an improved empirical mode decomposition (EMD) is proposed with masking signals of multiple frequencies added, which has obvious superiority in aliasing reduction compared with conventional methods. Then, an effective fault-diagnosis strategy based on energy distributions variations of OLTC vibration signals according to Lorentz information measure is brought up. The calculated results under normal and typical fault conditions of model and real OLTC have shown that the energy spectrums of different conditions vary significantly so that the similarity index can measure the difference degree of energy distribution. Meanwhile, the index of contact looseness is higher than the insulated panel looseness which indicates that the contact looseness fault has greater influence on switch-over process of OLTC.