Use of chirp excitations for frequency domain spectroscopy measurement of oil-paper insulation

Frequency domain spectroscopy is a non-invasive, offline test performed to estimate moisture content, conductivity and aging status of the composite oil-paper insulation of a transformer. In conventional frequency domain spectroscopy test, sinusoidal excitation voltage is applied on the insulation under test for two cycles starting from 0.1 mHz to 1 kHz. One important aspect of conventional dielectric response measurement is the choice of excitation voltage. The insulation in real life operation is often stressed by voltage waveforms, which are non-stationary in nature. Therefore, modification of excitation voltage waveform is required for reliable assessment of insulation condition. Another important factor is the measurement time. Conventional frequency sweep from 0.1 mHz to 1 kHz, makes frequency domain spectroscopy measurement inadvertently lengthy, hence development of new measuring technique is necessary to reduce measurement duration for diagnosis of insulation condition. Considering these two facts, this contribution reports the feasibility of conducting dielectric response measurement in frequency domain using chirp excitation voltage waveforms. Instead of applying sinusoidal excitation at discrete measurement frequencies, chirp signals (band limited from 0.1 mHz to 1 Hz) were used to conduct frequency domain spectroscopy measurement on three laboratory prepared test samples and on two transformers. The dielectric dissipation factors evaluated using chirp waveforms showed a very good agreement when compared to that obtained by using sinusoidal excitation. Besides, investigations also revealed that the proposed method offered least amount of measurement time in comparison with conventional measurement as well as with some existing state of the art methods.