Research and Implementation of UAV Partial Discharge Detection Technology Based on Acoustic Array

With the increasing number of transmission line towers, traditional partial discharge detection methods cannot meet the needs of fast and accurate inspection. Infrared detection methods cannot identify early defects with not clear temperature rise, and ultraviolet detection methods are expensive and have high false alarms. Therefore, this article proposes to use UAV equipped with acoustic array to achieve rapid and accurate large-scale partial discharge defect inspection. The main contributions of this article are as follows: 1. Analyzing the noise characteristics of UAV. 2. Filter out noise from both hardware and software levels. 3. Studying Sound source localization algorithm. 4. Integrating the above results and developing a set of partial discharge detection device suitable for DJI M300 UAV. In order to verify our results, we conducted on-site testing on a 10kV transmission line, and the results showed that the development results can identify and accurately locate partial discharge defects on the tower, which can not be verified from infrared camera.