A Reconfigurable Domino IPT System for 35 kV Transmission Line Insulator Ice Melting

At present, there is no online ice melting method for transmission line insulators whereas the ice on the insulators can cause icing flashovers, being dangerous to power delivery systems. Thus, a reconfigurable domino inductive power transfer (RD-IPT) system is proposed for 35 kV transmission line insulator ice melting. By using thermal relays, the topology of the system can alter automatically corresponding to the temperature of the insulator disks. To avoid the output power decreasing due to the change of the system topology, a frequency control method is also proposed to track the maximum output power under constant load resistances. A prototype is built to validate the performance of the proposed system. Experiment results show that the system can deliver 62.2 W power at least to the insulator heaters, and make the disk temperature 25°C larger than the ambient temperature. Thus, the proposed method can melt ice effectively.