A novel sensor for UWB RF PD location and experimental investigation on a 220kV transformer

Ultra-Wideband (UWB) RF partial discharge (PD) location technique is a new method for PD source location on power transformers, which is based on multi-antenna PD detection and Huygens-Fresnel principle. In this paper, a novel sensor with 2 GHz-8 GHz bandwidth for UWB RF detection has been designed. A new location algorithm named Space-Grid-Search Algorithm has been proposed which greatly eliminate the divergent effect of analytical method. Four typical artificial PD models are applied to a real 220 kV transformer. Then experiments have been carried out for PD location on the transformer using UWB RF technique. The test results indicate that the average error of the pre-set PD sources was about 30 centimeters.