Noniterative Method for Combined Acoustic-Electrical Partial Discharge Source Localization

The combined acoustic-electrical system is used in the factory or plant environment for the partial discharge (PD) source localization in power transformers. A noniterative method for this combined acoustic-electrical PD-locator-system is devised and presented in this paper for the first time. It employs three acoustic emission (AE) sensors. The proposed method is compared with the existing noniterative method used in the all-acoustic system, which employs four AE sensors. The comparative study shows that the proposed method can locate the PD source irrespective of its position within the tank, whereas the prevailing noniterative method for the all-acoustic system fails to locate the PD source at certain positions within the tank. The effect of the sensor positioning on the performance of the method is studied, and some guidelines for the sensor placement on the transformers tank wall in a factory or plant environment are suggested. The proposed method is also applied to the data taken from the published literature. The localization results are compared with those of an existing iterative method (Newton's method) to prove its superiority in terms of computational time.