Online Monitoring of Electrical Equipment Condition Based on Infrared Image Temperature Data Visualization

Temperature is one of the most common indicators for the health of electrical equipment in the substation. By now, infrared thermography has been an important monitoring tool due to its real‐time temperature measurement and noncontact manner. However, at present, portable thermal imagers are usually used to collect and store the status image of single equipment at a certain time, which cannot continuously track the condition of the equipment and the efficiency is very low. In order to solve this problem, our team proposed a method for online condition of electrical equipment based on the visualization and processing of infrared image temperature data. We developed video inspection software, equipped with an infrared camera for automatic inspection to obtain infrared images. After that, the target equipment in a whole image are automatically extracted based on the reference image and the equipment type of each target is classified. Then, in order to visualize temperature data and extract temperature information for different types of equipment, the concepts of heating spot, heating section, and heating area are defined. Finally, diagnosis rules based on relevant related thermal fault diagnosis standards and past experience are proposed to evaluate the condition of each target equipment, using the temperature rise and heat generation percentage. The method has been applied in a real substation and proved its effectiveness. © 2021 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.