Received signal strength intensity based localization of partial discharge in high voltage systems

Partial discharge (PD) refers to the release of energy that occurs due to insulation cracks that partially bridge conductors. The ultimate consequence of PD activity in high voltage systems is a catastrophic failure. The continuous monitoring of PD activity contributes to avoidance of such failures. In this paper, a novel localization algorithm is proposed. The PD location was estimated for ten different positions. The PD signal was generated by using an emulator, and eight measurement sensors have been used. The received signal was converted into distance and the location estimation performed satisfactorily with no prior information of path loss model parameters. The results obtained show that increasing the number of measurement sensors reduces the estimation error