Study on Bush Tree Growth in XLPE Using 3D PD Patterns

Exploitation of equipment with cross linked polyethylene (XLPE) insulationrequires its condition monitoring and diagnostic. Traditionally diagnostics of insulation is carriedout by means of partial discharge detection. However, such identification of a defect, forexample, void, inclusion or treeing, does not say about its danger from a point of view of fullinsulation gap breakdown and insulation construction failure. For this purpose a 29 kV CN-CVcable sample is studied. The experiment is based on research for determination of thedependencies between PD characteristics in XLPE upon time and three dimension PD patternsof corresponding treeing. The investigations were carried out by means of electricalmeasurement of PD current and simultaneous optical recording of treeing image. The needle-plane electrode is applied as the electrode. As a result,-q-n PD patterns which are used asthe bases to bush tree initialization and growth can be obtained. Test results show that PDpattern recognition can be applied as a powerful tool for recognizing electrical tree initializationand growth. This can make a good basis for on-line condition monitoring of high voltage powercable.