Statistical Distributions of Partial Discharges in Oil-paper Insulation Under AC-DC Combined Voltages

The converter transformer is one of the most critical equipments in high-voltage direct current transmission systems.Valve-side windings have to withstand complex stresses combined of AC,DC,and pulsed voltages.Partial discharges(PDs) can thus easily occur in oil-impregnated paper insulation.The current paper presents the statistical phase-resolved distributions of partial discharges in oil-paper insulation under combined AC and DC voltage stress.First,the voltages in the converter transformer were analyzed.In the experiments,four artificial insulation defect models were designed to generate PD signals under AC-DC combined voltage stress detected by a Rogowski coil sensor.Histograms including the φ-q-n data of these PD signals were created.The variations of φ-q-n data generated by PDs in different insulation defect models were analyzed while increasing the test voltage.Experimental results showed that the PD phase-resolved distributions of different insulation defect models were different from one another.The findings of the current study are useful in further research on the mechanism and pattern recognition of PDs in converter transformers.