Partial discharge characteristics of palm fatty acid ester (PFAE) as high voltage insulating material

Abstract

The world's energy requirement has been dominated by petroleum-based oil for centuries in many application fields, including transportation, household, and electricity. Mineral oil as one of petroleum-based product; an important insulating material in power system has been used more than 150 years. Mineral oil application in power system equipment can be potentially hazardous to the environment especially when there are any incidents during operational time like transformer explosion, which may cause a spill of oil to the soil or water stream. Due to the concerns about the reducing petroleum resources and the environmental issues, the alternative insulating oil with biodegradable characteristics has been attracted lots of attentions for a couple of decades. The purpose of this research work is to investigate the partial discharge characteristics of palm-based oil, namely palm fatty acid ester (PFAE) as biodegradable oil for power transformer oil application. The characteristics then compared to other biodegradable oil, namely soybean-based oil and commercially available mineral oil for further analysis. The effect of electrical stress and ageing time on the oil samples were performed in this work. The results revealed that the partial discharge characteristics of PFAE are similar with commercially mineral oil. Particularly, PD magnitudes of PFAE are slightly lower than those of mineral oil samples during the ageing time. Therefore, PFAE has a good potential to be used as power transformer oil in electrical power system application.Keyword-partial discharge characteristics; alternative insulating oil; biodegradable oil; palm-based oil; mineral oil; power transformer oil.

Electrical insulating liquid: A review

“…The results indicated that coconut oil has higher breakdown value than mineral oil. Ramli et al and Arief et al 44,45 studied about the partial discharge characteristics of palm fatty acid ester (PFAE) and draws the conclusion that PFAE has good potential to be used as cooling and insulating liquid in power transformer. Hosier et al 46 investigated biodegradable olive oil, rapeseed oil, crone and sunflower oil using ultraviolet/visible, infrared spectroscopes and found that olive oil offered excellent resistance to aging, rapeseed oil offered intermediate properties whereas corn and sunflower oil oxidized appreciably after aging.…”

Physical and Electrical Breakdown Characteristics of Oil-Impregnated Kenaf Paper with the Introduction of External PVA for Transformer Application

“…A paper is a dielectric material where an electric field may be maintained with either zero or near-zero power dissipation, whereby only a few electrons can move on the surface (McShane et al, 2003;Qu et al, 2020). AC breakdown strength of paper is an intrinsic property of dielectric material, independent of the electrode configuration where the electric stress is applied (Amin et al, 2018;Ramli et al, 2014;Zhou & Chen, 2017). The minimum voltage at which the dielectric material fails is known as AC breakdown voltage (Baur et al, 2017;Elanseralathan et al, 2000).…”

Determination of better insulating oil for power transformer oil application using Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP)

“…Lately, natural ester liquid such as vegetable oil has been discovered to be a good alternative for transformer insulating oil after considering some factors. These types of oil are also known as biodegradable insulating oil which contains non-toxicity and is a sustainable source of future [1]. Generally, the transformer functions as a converting tool between 2 levels of alternating current (AC) voltage and is typically known as the backbone of an electrical transmission system [2].…”