Feasibility Study on Condition Monitoring of Power Network Asset Using PMU Measurements

Current asset management for distribution networks has adopted a passive strategy - either run to failure or perform field inspection of limited assets within a fixed period. This paper aims to study the feasibility of using high-resolution data recorded by phasor measurement units (PMUs) for real-time asset monitoring. Accelerated ageing experiment on a laboratory transformer and the insulator pollution experiment have been performed. The PMU measurements collected from both experiments are used to evaluate the asset health conditions by examing the standard deviation of the signal to noise ratio (SNR) after the statistical analysis and noise segregation of the original PMU measurements. A comparative study between the traditional condition assessment method and the proposed method demonstrates the feasibility of using the PMU data to evaluate the asset health conditions.