Reliability and influences on dielectric diagnostic methods to evaluate the ageing state of oil-paper insulations

Dielectric measurements and diagnostic methods are established procedures to evaluate moisture as an ageing indicator in commonly used oil-paper insulations of power transformers. Both the measurements themselves as well as the analysis of collected data contain several uncertainties and sources of error. This investigation discusses the sources of error and gives a further insight to the influences of transformer insulation design (geometry), insulation temperature, moisture equilibrium in oil and paper and other aspects regarding practical measurements. The dominating impact on dielectric analysis is related to the insulation temperature rather than insulation geometry. Limits and influences on linear modelling of multilayer insulations by equivalent circuits are described too. The investigation includes all the common dielectric diagnostic methods for oil-paper insulations: Recovery Voltage Method (RVM), Polarisation and Depolarisation Currents (PDC) and Frequency Domain Spectroscopy (FDS).