Study on electrical tree growth in XLPE by PD patterns

Exploitation of equipment with cross linked polyethylene (XLPE) insulation requires its condition monitoring and diagnostics. Traditionally, diagnostics of insulation is carried out by means of partial discharge detection. Many researchers have developed a lot of methods to identify the defect by the PD form. However, such identification of a defect, for example, void, inclusion or treeing, does not say about its danger from a point of view of full insulation gap breakdown and insulation construction failure. The information about the form and size of formed upon high voltage treeing is necessary for prediction of the remaining resource of XLPE insulation. For this purpose we carry out experimental research for determination of the dependencies between PD characteristics in XLPE upon time and three dimension PD patterns of corresponding treeing. The investigations were carried out by means of electrical measurement of PD current and simultaneous optical recording of treeing image. Test results show that the PD patterns can be applied to detecting tree growth well.