HITEC University Taxila

Department of Electrical Engineering

Capacitance and Tan δ Measuring Equipment

for High Voltage Insulation
Submitted To:

Dr. Kashif Imdaad

Submitted To:

Waleed Amjad Awan (17-MS-EE-007)

HITEC UNIVERSITY
Taxila, Pakistan
 Capacitance and Tan δMeasuring Equipment
for
High Voltage Insulation
Abstract:
Capacitance and tan δ measurements are usually carried out to estimate the fitness
of an insulation. Different equipments and methodologies are available to test insulation in
cables, transformers, bushings etc. This paper design is divided in three parts as filter unit,
test unit, and the measuring unit. These units are separately modeled and simulated using
software

Introduction:
Insulation plays a vital role in power system as they prevent unwanted flow of
current in unintended paths. Electrical insulation provides a very high resistive path through
which practically negligible current can flow. Therefore, in order to prevent the flow of
current from the conductor to the earth through these structures, insulators must be
installed [1].
Diagnostic tests are necessary for the evaluation of the quality of electrical insulation in HV
installations.
Dielectric measurements are carried out to understand the insulation properties of
equipment and to take preventive measures. The dielectric measurements consist of
dissipation factor (tan δ), capacitance, insulation resistance and the dielectric diagnostics
(measurement of current and voltage in the time and frequency domain).

DISSIPATION FACTOR AND CAPACITANCE MEASUREMENT:

Dissipation factor and capacitance depend on the material and construction
of the equipment. an increasing capacitance of bushings could be a result of the discharge
between partial capacitances inside the equipment. An increasing dissipation factor can be
the outcome of increasing humidity or structural changes caused by aging, as well as due to
the inception of high partial discharge [2].

Modified Vectorial Impedance Measurement Method:

This paper describes a method to determine the capacitance and tan δ which is a
modification of the vectorial impedance method. In the original method, current waveforms
of the two branches have to be accurately taken in order to detect the phase difference
between the current waveforms. Current transformers can be used to take out the currents
without doing any considerable effect on the circuit. However, waveforms get distorted
after converting through a current transformer. Thus, zero detection is difficult. Tan δ is a
very small value and, therefore, the phase difference between the waveforms is also a small
value. Therefore, detecting this small phase difference accurately is difficult with the
distortions of the waveforms. In addition to that, small currents flowing through the
branches will become even smaller through current transformers. In order to overcome
those complications in using current transformers for this application, voltage waveforms
are taken out rather than the currents for the zero detection [5]. In that case, resistors can
be used in the two branches and voltages across them are supplied to the measuring unit to
obtain the tan δ value.

Fi g p p p

VS VX

A simulation was carried out to check whether the phase difference deviates from the
original value. Here, currents from the circuit where there are no resistors were taken out to
get the phase difference and the circuit shown in Fig. 1 was simulated.
The variable resistor is changed until the two voltages VS and VX are equal in magnitude.
After equalizing the voltage magnitudes, the voltages across the resistors were supplied to
the measuring circuit to determine the capacitance and tan δ values. The phasor diagram
for the modified circuit will have the following form as shown in Fig. 4. The difference
between the two voltage waveforms are illustrated in Fig.3.

Phase difference between the voltage waveforms

 1

Measuring

Voltage (V)
0.5

signal
0

-0.5

Reference δX
-1 signal
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Time (us)

he quality of an insulation can be determined by the ratio of the resistive component to the
capacitive component of the leakage current. This ratio is called the dissipation factor
(IR/IC). Here, a capacitor with a known dissipation factor (tan δS) is taken as the reference
capacitor.

MODELLING AND SIMULATION:

The whole circuit is modeled and simulated using MATLAB Simulink
A. Eliminating Partial Discharges:
An important task is to eliminate partial discharges from the voltage that is
going to be applied to the test circuit. The requirement is to design and implement a low
pass filter as the partial discharges have a high frequency. A filter circuit is capable of
selectively filtering a frequency or range of
frequencies. active filters themselves contain operational amplifiers (Op-Amps) which
cannot handle large power or withstand HV. Therefore, an RC filter has been designed using
first principles. Any partial
discharge is eliminated allowing for high transferring quality, an almost pure sine wave
voltage from the source side to test circuit. A low pass filter having 50Hz cut-off frequency is
needed for this application. The most simple low pass filter is the passive RC low pass
network shown in the following Fig. 7.

Its transfer function is:

1
RC 1
A ( s )= =
s+1/ RC 1+ sRC
Where the complex frequency variable, s = jω+σ, allows for any time variable signals.
For frequency ratios F >> 1, the roll-off is 20 dB/decade. This fundamental theory is
considered for the filter design to eliminate the partial discharges of the transformer
output. A 150μF capacitor is used with a 5Ω current limiting resistor.

MATLAB Simulation:
The filter unit is modeled as shown in the Fig. 8. A 15kV sinusoidal signal with noise is
supplied to the filter circuit which filters the noise components and delivers a 50Hz pure
sinusoidal signal. High-frequency components are grounded by the capacitor in the unit.
According to the simulation results, a 150 µF capacitor is sufficient to eliminate partial
discharges in this circuit.

B. Test unit simulation:

The filtered signal, after eliminating the partial discharges is supplied to the
test unit. It consists of a standard/reference capacitor, test object, a non-inductive
variable resistor and a non-inductive fixed resistor. As tan δ value is known for the
reference capacitor, its resistance can be calculated. 200pF and 1.59TΩ are set up for
the capacitance and the parallel resistance of the reference capacitor respectively.
Parameters of the test object were estimated. Fig. 11 shows results when the test
object resistance was 15 GΩ and the capacitance was 490 pF. Non-inductive fixed
 resistor value is selected by running the simulation for several times in order to keep
the voltage across the resistors within 0-5V range because this voltage can be
supplied directly to the measuring unit. By the simulation, the value of the fixed non-
inductive resistor was chosen as 10 kΩ. As shown in Fig. 11, the voltage difference
across the resistors of the two branches is measured by the simulation. Simulations
were carried out several times to make this voltage close to zero as much as possible
by changing the value of the non-inductive variable resistor. Fourier blocks are used
to get the phase angle values of the waveforms. The phase angle difference between
the two waveforms is simply identified by displaying them using a display. Fig. 12
shows the waveforms obtained for the currents in the two branches. As the two
separate waveforms cannot be seen properly in the Fig. 12(a), zoomed in waveforms
are illustrated in Fig. 12 (b). According to the graphs obtained, there is a small
difference between the waveforms. This angle is δ and can be used to determine the
tan δ value of the test object by using (1) and (2). Equations (3), (4) and (5) can be
used to determine the capacitance value of the test object.
C. Integrated Model:
After analyzing filter and the test units, they are integrated to model and
simulate the system as one circuit. Using these simulations, the behavior of the system
can be understood under different conditions analyzing it as one. Fig. 13 shows the
integrated model of the whole circuit. This model can be used to analyze the circuit for
various scenarios, such as different values of the source voltage and the different
capacitance and resistance values of the test object According to the simulation results,
the tan δ value was obtained as 0.00043 and the capacitance was 490.21 pF.

CONCLUSION:
This paper has presented a modified vectorial impedance measurement
method for the routine monitoring of capacitance and tan δ values of an insulation, which is
important in preventing insulations failing due to dielectric degradation. The model
developed has been validated by comparison with simulation studies. Simulation results
show that while tan δ value and capacitance values do not change significantly with the test
voltage in a healthy insulation, aging of the insulation will increase both tan δ value and the
capacitance.

References:

[1] J. S. T. Loom, “Insulating materials,” in Insulators for High Voltages, London,Peter

Peregrinus Ltd., 1988, pp. 20-25.
[2] S. Kornhuber, S. Markalous, M. Muhr, T. Strehl and C. Sumereder “Comparison of
methods for dissipation factor measurement at practical examples”, in Proceedings of the
International Symposium on High Voltage Engineering, Johannesburg, 2009.
[3] M. Muhr, G. Knollseisen, R.Schwarz and C. Sumereder, “Comparison of methods for the
dissipation factor measurement”, in Proceedings of the International Scientific Colloquium,
Ilmenau, 2006.
[4] J. R. Lucas, “Measurement of High Voltage,” in High Voltage Engineering, Sri Lanka, 2001,
pp. 110-122.
[5] W. Hauschild and E. Lemke, “Measurement of Dielectric Properties”, in High-Voltage Test
and Measuring Techniques,New York, Springer, 2014, pp. 233-248. [6] W. Tranter, R.
Thamvichai and T. Bose, Basic Simulation Models of Phase Tracking Devices Using MATLAB,
Morgan & Claypool, 2010.