Evaluation of the sensitivity of measuring circuits for corona discharges detection
Milad Soltany, Jordi-Roger Riba and Santiago Bogarra Department of Electrical Engineering, AMBER High-Voltage Laboratory, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Campus de Terrassa (Spain) 2026-02-15

Abstract

Partial discharges (PD) play a major role in the degradation of insulation in high voltage equipment. PD occurs when localized electrical breakdowns occur in the presence of a high electric field near an insulator. A critical aspect of PD
measurement is the calibration of the measurement system. Calibration results in a scale factor (k), that is used to convert the measured signal to the apparent charge. This paper presents a comparative analysis of five different measurement circuits used for PD detection. The experiments were performed using a sphere-to-plane configuration. In addition to the conversion factor, this study also examines the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for each measurement system.

Key words: Corona discharges, partial discharges, apparent charge, calibration, sensitivity.

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