Physical Model for Frequency Domain Spectroscopy of Oil–Paper Insulation in a Wide Temperature Range by a Novel Analysis Approach

Abstract

Frequency domain spectroscopy is considered to be a promising and novel method for the assessment of the insulation condition of power equipment. This work has practical significance as it explains the microscopic mechanism of this method in a wide temperature range and further establishes its quantitative model. To achieve this, in the present paper, we select oil-impregnated paper—one of the most common insulation materials for power equipment with a complex microstructure—as a test sample, deduce a formula based on the relationship between the real and imaginary parts of the complex permittivity to extract the spectra of independent dielectric processes and measure the frequency domain spectra of oil-impregnated paper under different temperatures, as well as its thermally stimulated depolarization current with a series of bias voltages. The analysis results reveal that oil-impregnated paper’s frequency domain spectra in a wide temperature range are mainly determined by dielectric processes whose generation mechanisms are low-frequency dispersion, DC conduction, electrode relaxation, interfacial relaxation and dipole relaxation, respectively. Moreover, due to the different thermal properties of charge motions, the macroscopic characteristics and microscopic generation mechanisms of both spectra vary significantly with the sample’s temperature. After verifying the generation mechanisms of the spectra in high, middle and low-temperature ranges, function models for those spectra with clear physical meanings are established separately, providing sufficient physical parameters to carry out insulation assessment.