Characterization of PDIV, PDEV, and RPDIV in Insulated Wires Under Unipolar Repetitive Square Wave Excitations for Inverter-Fed Motors

Abstract

The behaviour of partial discharge inception voltage (PDIV), partial discharge extinction voltage (PDEV) and repetitive partial discharge inception voltage (RPDIV) as a function of exposure/poling time under unipolar repetitive square wave excitations at atmospheric pressure (1013 mbar) is experimentally measured and investigated. The partial discharge (PD) tests are performed on two commercially available insulated wires: Glass fibre as Type II and Polyether Ether Ketone (PEEK) as Type I insulated wires used in inverter-fed motors. The impact of excitation polarity, pulse repetition frequency and rise time on the PD quantities (i.e., PDIV, PDEV and RPDIV) is studied as a function of stressing duration. In addition, the trend of RPDIV and PDIV dispersion levels are compared as a function of poling time under positive and negative unipolar excitations with two rise times (i.e., 80 and 800 ns) and two pulse repetition frequencies (i.e., 50 Hz and 2.5 kHz), relying on the shape/slope parameter of the Weibull distribution. The collected data shows that the electric field induced by the interface charge deposited by PD occurring during consecutive pulses and the space charge accumulation in the insulation bulk plays a decisive role in PD quantities’ variations under unipolar repetitive square wave excitations.

Keywords

• Electric machines
• partial discharges
• pulse width modulation
• space charge
• variable speed drives