Signal conditioning electronics for UHF partial discharge detection and location system.

Partial Discharge (PD) occurs in damaged high-voltage insulation. PD results in UHF electromagnetic radiation which can be used to detect and locate insulation faults in HV power systems equipment such as transmission lines and transformers thereby providing early indication of equipment failure [1 - 5]. The majority of the power in the PD radiation is contained in the band 50 MHz to 800 MHz. A wireless sensor network (WSN) is being designed and implemented to receive this PD radiation to provide a non-invasive method of locating and monitoring PD. Each WSN node is required to operate for as long as possible (?1 year) without the need to change the energy source and to be sufficiently cheap to make a dense sensor network viable. Low cost, low power, circuitry for each node has therefore been developed. It is impractical to consider sampling radiated PD signals directly due to their large bandwidth leading to large data storage and/or data transmission requirements. The system being developed reduces signal bandwidth, and therefore the sampling rate and volume of data to be processed, using signal conditioning electronics (SCE) based on a transistor-reset integrator (TRI)