Design and Implementation of Ultra-Wide Band Antenna for Partial Discharge Detection in High Voltage Power Equipment

Partial discharges (PD) are the most common and harmful threat to the health of electrical insulation of high voltage (HV) and high field (HF) equipment. The occurrence of PD activity in HV and MV equipment is at the same time a cause and a sign of insulation degradation that may eventually result in the breakdown of the HV power equipment. For the safe and reliable operation of HV power equipment, continuous PD monitoring needs to be conducted conveniently to prevent any unplanned power outages and damage to electrical power equipment. The ultra-high frequency (UHF) PD measurement method has been widely used as an effective technique to detect PD activity on HV power equipment due to its non-invasive principle. To enable PD detection accuracy, there is still a need for more sensitive PD sensors that can assist the UHF PD monitoring system by suppressing ambient background noise and low-frequency electromagnetic interferences from telecommunication such as GSM signals. To tackle the sensitivity issues, this article presents a new design of ultra-wideband (UWB) microstrip patch antenna that is capable of effective suppression of low-frequency interference signals. The proposed antenna, designed, simulated, and optimized using the CST Microwave Studio software, has a bandwidth of 3.3GHz, below -10dB, in the operating frequency range of 1.2GHz-4.5GHz. The prototype of this antenna, printed on an FR4 substrate of a thickness of 1.6mm and a dielectric constant of 4.4, featuring a compact size of 100mm
$\times100$
mm
$\times1.6$
mm, was implemented to detect PD through laboratory experiments. This paper shows that the designed UWB antenna has high sensitivity, good noise rejection and it is, therefore, a promising candidate sensor for PD detection on HV equipment.