Distribution Capacitor Health Monitoring Based on the Disturbances of Element Breakdown Faults

As a common incipient fault for a compensation capacitor, the internal capacitor element breakdown fault (CEBF) causes slight changes in the steady-state voltage and current, which are difficult to accurately capture under the influence of measurement error. Therefore, to meet the demand for intelligent equipment maintenance by a smart grid, transient disturbances induced by a CEBF are used in this study to acquire element breakdown information for online monitoring of capacitor health. A transient response analysis of the CEBF in the time and frequency domains is used to establish the typical transient characteristics. Then, a multiple-kernel support vector machine algorithm is adopted to identify the transient disturbances. A method for determining the faulty capacitor unit is proposed based on the position of the waveform monitor. Under the assumption and statistics of the number of failed elements in a series group, a scheme for assessing the health condition is investigated. The proposed method can effectively obtain breakdown information to assess capacitor health with little influence of measurement error and background noise. The results of a theoretical analysis, computer simulation, lab experiment and field monitoring verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.