Space charge characteristics of oil-paper insulation with new paper and aged oil

Oil-paper compound insulation has been widely used in power transformers for quite a long time because of its good performances. The insulation gradually degrades under combined thermal, electrical and chemical stresses during routine operations, mainly because of space charges inside. This work investigated the space charge characteristics in oil-paper insulation under oil aging circumstance. New transformer oil samples are thermally aged to obtain different aging states, and their physical and chemical properties are analyzed. New Kraft papers are dried in vacuum and fully immersed in these different aged oil samples, and three kinds of oil-paper samples are obtained. We use the pulsed electro-acoustic (PEA) method to measure space charge under both DC voltage-on and voltage-off conditions at room temperature. The effect of oil aging state on characteristics of space charge injection, accumulation, and decay is analyzed and discussed. The results show that comparing with the DC voltage-off condition, more charges are injected into samples at the interface of electrode and dielectric when DC voltage is on. When the oil-aged state gets worse, more charges are induced at both cathode and anode, more space charges are accumulated in the bulk, the area of negative charges is larger, and local electric field is distorted more seriously. Moreover, for the voltage-off condition, aged oil is good for space charge decay, and trapped positive space charges decay faster than trapped negative charges.