Partial discharge monitoring of High Voltage equipment using chipless RFID sensor

In this paper a novel non-invasive radiometric Partial Discharge (PD) detection and identification of faulty power equipment within a distribution substation using chipless Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) based sensor system is presented. The sensor is a multi-resonator based passive circuit with an antenna for reception of PD signal from the source. The low cost RFID sensor is installed in individual High Voltage (HV) sensing unit thus it facilitates simultaneous monitoring of multiple small units. Each sensor block captures PD signal processes it with distinct spectral signatures as identification data bits and transmits the signal to a single sampling channel. Analyzing the PD signal, both the PD level and source identification can be retrieved. The prototype sensor is designed, fabricated, and tested for performance analysis. Results verify that the sensor is capable of identifying different sources at the events of PD.