Analysis of Partial Discharges in Electrical Tree Growth Under Very Low Frequency (VLF) Excitation Through Pulse Sequence and Nonlinear Time Series Analysis

Electrical treeing is the main degradation mechanism in high voltage polymeric insulation, that leads to power system plant failure and the loss of electricity supply. Electrical trees grow under partial discharge (PD) activity, which can be measured and analyzed to understand and characterize electrical tree growth. In this work, PD measurements were analyzed for electrical trees grown in epoxy resin needle-plane samples under very low frequency (VLF, 0.1 Hz) voltage excitation. VLF is interesting as it is used for testing power cables and other high capacitance insulation loads. However, more experience and new methods are needed for PD interpretation. PDs were studied using two tools: pulse sequence analysis (PSA) and nonlinear time series analysis (NLTSA) from dynamic system theory. PSA was treated here as a particular case of NLTSA since their constructions are similar in their mathematical treatment. The experimental results showed that electrical trees grown at VLF had branch-type structure and times to breakdown about fifty times larger than samples aged at industrial frequency. PSA plots were compared with 2D projections of state-space trajectories that represent the dynamics of the nonlinear system (NLTSA approach). In terms of graphical representation, NLTSA 2D projections generated more clusters than the PSA plots, thus, it was interpreted that NLTSA revealed more details about the nonlinear dynamic system associated with electrical tree growth. On the other hand, using the NLTSA approach, the correlation dimension was estimated to characterize the electrical tree growth. The results showed a different evolution obtained for VLF excitation compared to the results reported for test samples aged at industrial frequency in other studies.