A New Testing Method for the Dielectric Response of Oil-Immersed Transformer

Oil-immersed transformer is one of the most important electrical equipment in power distribution and transmission systems. Dielectric response method is a well-recognized method to diagnose the insulation defect of oil-immersed transformers. However, the applicability of this method is restricted due to the long testing time. Under some special field conditions, the method is not even applicable. In this article, a novel testing method is proposed based on the following ideas: first, the low-frequency dielectric parameters are extracted by using mixing frequency excitation; then, parameters of the extended Debye equivalent circuit are determined based on cuckoo search optimization algorithm; finally, the specific parameters are used to the established simulation model and obtain the recovery voltage curve. Compared with the traditional method, the testing time of the proposed method has been greatly reduced. Besides, dielectric parameters in both frequency domain and time domain can be obtained simultaneously. The applicability of the proposed method is verified by the dielectric response measurements on a laboratory transformer and a real power transformer in a substation.