Partial Discharge Detection Method for Gas Insulated Switchgear Based on Acoustic Array

Partial discharge detection is of great significance for the stable operation of Gas Insulated Switchgear equipment. The common methods for partial discharge detection currently include pulse current detection, chemical detection, optical detection, ultra-high frequency detection, ultrasonic detection, and infrared thermal imaging. Among them, the ultrasonic method is a non-destructive monitoring method. This paper proposes the use of a microphone array consisting of 6 MEMS microphones to achieve the localization of partial discharge. The main content of this paper is to select the microphone array with the best localization performance for partial discharge detection of Gas Insulated Switchgear equipment. Three different microphone arrays were constructed in this work, namely, the one-dimensional linear array, the two-dimensional rectangular array, and the two-dimensional circular array. Partial discharge detection experiments were carried out using different microphone arrays, and the results show that the two-dimensional circular array has better localization performance.