ACCELERATED AGEING TEST FACILITY FOR MV/LV DISTRIBUTION TRANSFORMERS: RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The asset management of the electric network components is an important issue for the DSO to guarantee a high quality and reliable energy distribution. In this context, transformers are ones of the most crucial equipment. Thus, the best possible understanding of degradation processes inside operating transformers is needed to assess their residual lifetime and plan their replacement. In this paper, a new test facility for transformer ageing is presented. The test results allowed to examine methanol and ethanol as ageing tracers to assess residual lifetime, and to ascertain the correlation of experimental data with the paper-ageing model updated in the last edition of IEC 60076–7.