A Mechanical-Electromagnetic Coupling Model of Transformer Windings and its Application in the Vibration-Based Condition Monitoring

Winding vibration leads to the oscillation of coils position and further affects winding's nonlinear stiffness as well as electromagnetic forces (EMFs). This paper establishes a winding Mechanical-Electromagnetic Coupling Model (MECM) where the coupling between stiffness coefficient and vibration, magnetic field and vibration are considered, and deploy it in the vibration-based condition monitoring. In this model, EMFs are obtained through the superposition of leakage magnetic field generated by each coil. A novel numerical analysis method is further proposed, which is capable of calculating the vibration response containing nonlinearity and electromechanical coupling, and the accuracy of the method is verified in experiments. Then, the numerical analysis method is used to quantitatively analyze the effects of Nonlinearity and ElectroMechanical Coupling (NEMC) on the vibration characteristics. The study demonstrates the law that NEMC intensity increases with vibration, and the NEMC is obvious especially under mechanical fault. To extract the vibration patterns, Nonlinearity-ElectroMechanical Coupling Coefficient (NEMCC) with amplifying NEMC effects is proposed to monitor the winding mechanical condition. The analytical method predicts the variation trend of the winding looseness condition curve, and laboratory experiments prove that the Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) is able to successfully identify different degrees of winding looseness faults. Compared with the short-circuit impedance (SCI) method, the MAPE value based on NEMCC has a stronger detection capability and higher sensitivity for winding mechanical faults. This paper lays a foundation for the numerical solution of vibration response and pave a way for winding mechanical condition monitoring.