Detection of incipient faults in oil-immersed power transformers based on dissolved gas analysis: Case studies

Abstract Power transformers are one of the most crucial as well as costly equipment in power grids. Nowadays, a set of factors like the growing load, expanding power consumption, and market liberation affect on the transformer reliability and operational lifetime. At present, numerous approaches are on hand to diagnosis and evaluate their operational conditions. Dissolved gas analysis (DGA) in the insulation oil is an efficient diagnostic scheme which can offer an essential source for transformer failure diagnosis. In this paper, five existing approaches of utilizing dissolved gas data to identify fault kind in power transformers oil are employed. The considered methods are: key gas technique, IEC 60599 technique, Doernenburg ratio scheme, Duval triangle framework, as well as Rogers ratio scheme. These fault diagnosis methods are used to interpret and validate the dissolved gas analysis (DGA) results for four case studies. The experiments are performed on four 15.75 kV/400 kV, 3-Phase, 250 MVA power transformers in a thermal power plant. The obtained DGA results reveal that all considered DGA methods have effectively detected the fault type for each considered case except Duval triangle method which has failed to discover the fault type for two cases.