MONTE – CARLO ANALYSIS OF CYLINDRICAL PARTICLE DISLODGEMENT IN POWER TRANSFORMER

Transformers represent the largest portion of capital investment in transmission and distribution substations. In addition, transformer outages have a considerable economic impact on the operation of an electrical network. Power transformers are designed to transmit and distribute electrical power. There is an increasing need to move from traditional schedule-based maintenance programs to condition-based maintenance of transformers. A large number of techniques are available for transformer health monitoring. However, a focused approach is required for better diagnostics. Mineral oil is the commonly used insulation and coolant in transformers. One of the major problems in the liquid insulation is the particle contamination, which can seriously degrade the breakdown voltage of the insulation. The movement of conducting particles under operating voltage can generate partial discharge (PD) that can lead to the complete failure of the insulation system during long term operation. Hence analysis of partial discharges due to different particles is carried out. The present paper deals with the occurrence of PD using probabilistic method for different length of cylindrical like particle