Influence of temperature, moisture content and ageing on oil impregnated paper bushings insulation

Insulators or bushings are one of the most common cause of transformer failures especially those with fire and collateral damage. This can be prevented by application of off-line and on-line monitoring, especially by measuring of capacitance C and dielectric dissipation factor tanδ, but current physical understanding of these parameters should be improved. A complex research of temperature dependence of C and tanδ, which is based on measurements on a specially designed oil impregnated paper bushing models with different moisture contents in the insulation and during artificial ageing, is presented in the paper. Useful relationships, which enable calculation of tanδ as a function of observed influencing parameters, are also presented.