Knowing Ahead of Time

Permanent Continuous Online Partial Discharge Monitoring


Discover the advantages of monitoring partial discharge activity over the entire or remaining service life of electrical equipment.
If you are responsible for the investment and reliability of electrical equipment, then you are most likely interested to know about how you can best protect your investment by ensuring the long-term reliability of this equipment, preventing failures and costly outages, and even extending its lifetime.

Partial discharge activity is a key indicator of developing insulation defects

Equipment failure is often linked to a failure in its electrical insultation system. Partial discharge (PD) activity is a well-accepted indicator of insulation deterioration in electrical assets. The performance of the materials used for electrical insulation has improved greatly over the years. Even though it can withstand the operating voltages it is exposed to for long periods of time, various conditions, such as load, temperature, humidity, and operational wear-and-tear, eventually cause defects and aging in the insulation. Increasing PD activity levels indicate developing insulation defects that can eventually lead to premature failure, equipment damage, safety risks and unavoidable service outages.

Detecting and assessing PD activity in electrical equipment

Periodic PD diagnostic measurements during planned maintenance outages provide you with essential snapshots of insulation condition at particular times during the equipment’s service life. Temporary online PD monitoring is a useful method performed between diagnostic measurements for observing detected PD activity and its effect on insulation when the equipment is operating under load.  

The importance of permanent PD monitoring on older equipment

As your equipment ages, implementing a permanent online PD monitoring system is an important consideration for you to make to predict future performance and anticipate failure during the equipment’s remaining service life. It will also help you to make timely condition-based decisions about maintenance and eventual replacement before failure and costly outages occur.
 

Learn more about online PD monitoring

Listen to our podcast episode

In our Energy Talks podcast episode 50, our PD monitoring experts Bogdan Gorgan and Patrick Zander tell us more about permanent online PD monitoring. They explain why many utilities and industrial plants worldwide have implemented permanent PD monitoring to ensure the continued reliability of their aging electrical equipment, avoid pre-mature failures and extend service life.

They also discuss how permanent PD monitoring systems help equipment owners make more timely decisions about maintenance and asset planning based on actual asset condition. Lastly, they describe the available OMICRON solutions for permanent online PD monitoring, how they are installed and how users can easily interpret the gathered data without the need for a PD expert to explain the results.

 

Also of interest:
Be sure to also listen to our Energy Talks podcast episode 38. In this episode, our PD monitoring experts Bogdan Gorgan and Patrick Zander talk about when and how to perform temporary online PD monitoring between diagnostic PD measurements to observe detected PD activity under real operational conditions.

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