Numerical Study of Estimating the Arrival Time of UHF Signals for Partial Discharge Localization in a Power Transformer

Abstract

Partial discharges (PDs) are electrical sparks that occur inside insulation between two conducting electrodes and can lead to the disastrous failure of insulation systems. To determine the location of a PD, a distributed array of UHF PD sensors is used to detect the electromagnetic (EM) signals emitted from the PD source, and the localization of the PD source can be estimated using the time difference of arrival (TDOA) between EM signals captured by the UHF PD sensor array. There are four popular methods to estimate the TDOA-the first peak method, the cross-correlation method, the energy criterion method, and the average time window threshold method. In this work, we numerically investigate the influence of noise on estimating the TDOA for the four different methods. Numerical results show that the energy criterion method is more robust against noise than other methods.