On-line monitoring of partial discharges in a HVDC station environment

This paper deals with the on-line measurement of partial discharges (PD) in a high voltage direct current (HVDC) converter station. The HVDC station is a particularly challenging environment for measurement due to elevated interference levels caused from the switching of thyristor-controlled converters. In this work, online PD measurements were performed on two specimens; one is an HVDC converter transformer and the other an HVDC converter wall bushing. The measurements were performed in the high-frequency range from 400 kHz to 30 MHz with modern wideband PD measurement instrumentation. Results demonstrate that on-line measurement of PD in an HVDC station environment is possible and that a combination of input filtering and modern signal processing methods for feature extraction can be used to mitigate the converter interference. The feature extraction method used plots partial discharge data on a time-frequency classification map. The map enabled isolation of individual PD phenomena, and demonstrated that trending to monitor insulation degradation is possible with online partial discharge measurement. Furthermore, specific strategies for PD measurement and analysis are developed for each of the transformer and bushing specimens.