Cable commissioning and diagnostic tests: The effect of voltage supply frequency on partial discharge behavior

CIGRE documents, IEEE and IEC standards permit alternate power supply frequencies to reduce the size of the power supply for offline tests, such as those using resonant systems, Very Low Frequency (VLF) and Damped Alternating Current (DAC). To provide insight into the risks of adopting these alternatives, partial discharge (PD) measurements are reported herein for medium voltage (MV) cables with artificial defects, in a range of supply frequencies from 0.01 Hz to 60 Hz and at different temperatures. The results show that varying temperature and frequency changes the PD repetition rate, amplitude and energy, raising questions about the interpretation of diagnostic measurements made at VLF and any other alternate method allowed by the standard