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', 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,q,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,q, n) plot.