Analysis of Partial Discharge Patterns for Generator Stator Windings

Abstract

Forced outage of generators due to stator winding insulation failure can result in significant financial loss because of the high cost repair and loss of production. In recent years, the demand for insulation diagnosis is increasing to prevent unexpected failures, as the capacity of generators has increased. Insulation diagnosis is composed of the insulation resistance measurement, polarization index measurement, dissipation factor (DF) tip-up test, AC current increasing ratio measurement, and the partial discharge (PD) measurement. In this paper, the results of the PD measurement and PD pulse pattern analysis performed on a healthy generator and two generators that experienced dielectric breakdown failure during operation is presented.