Design and Development of an Integrated Software and Hardware System for the Measurement and Analysis of Partial Discharges

This paper entails the design and development of a Partial Discharge processing and analysis system (PDPAS) for the acquisition and analysis of partial discharges (PD) which can measure the phase ‘$\Phi^{\prime}$, charge magnitude ‘q’ and number of pulses ‘n’ occurring in a given AC power line cycle and plot them in a three dimensional plot $(\Phi,\mathbf{q},\mathbf{n})$. The two channels of the digitizer are fed with the artificially generated AC sinusoidal reference signal and the simulated PD pulses which are sampled at 50 MSa/s and stored up to 8 Megabytes per channel. The acquisition and analysis programs are developed in LabVIEW. The system was tested with artificial PD pulses of both constant and variable magnitude (q) and phases $(\Phi)$. The processing and analysis programs extracted relevant PD information such as the number (n), magnitude (q) and phase $(\Phi)$ of the PD pulses from the artificial PD pulses to plot a three dimensional $(\Phi,\mathbf{q},\mathbf{n})$ plot.