2005 IEEE/PES Transmission and Distribution

Conference & Exhibition: Asia and Pacific

Dalian, China

The Network-model On-line Monitoring System

of ZnO Surge Arresters in 500kV Substation
Deng Wei, Liu Weidong, Fu Zhiyang and Cao Jian

Abstract-- In this paper, some existing problems of the on-line

monitoring of ZnO surge arresters are discussed. On the basis of
the measuring method of resistive basic harmonic current, some
improvements are introduced, including the unique device for
signal acquisition, selection of reference signal, time sharing and
self calibration technique. The on-line monitoring of 500kV ZnO
surge arresters shows that the performance of this instrument is
perfect in the collection, processing of the signal and preventing
electromagnetic disturbances. Furthermore, it can be used freely
among the 3 modes of local test, remote test and automatic test to
realize the goal of full automation.
Index TermsZnO surge arresters, leakage current, resistive
current, on-line monitoring, net-work model.

I. INTRODUCTION

eing important over-voltage protection devices, the ZnO

surg arresters have been widely used in electric power
system due to their excellent nonlinear characteristic and high
surge absorbing capability. Considering that the ZnO surge
arresters have canceled gaps, degradation will gradually occur
under operating voltage, electric or mechanical stress.
Furthermore, some of them might be moistened because of the
structure problems. All these could lead to the increase of
leakage current, especially the resistive component of the
arresters. The resistive component of the internal leakage
current, which is proportional to the third harmonic content, is
very important in the operational performance of ZnO surge
arresters. As we know, the traditional preventive experiment
itself has some disadvantage and cant detect the insulation
fault timely. Therefore, it is important to take on-line
monitoring for the leakage current (IL) and resistive current (Ir)
so as to indicate the actual service condition of the ZnO surge
arresters.
In the process of on-line monitoring for 500kV ZnO
surge arresters, however, some problems may exit, including:
i) Severe electromagnetic interference. Since the magnitude
of IL is mere a few milliamperes and Ir is only (5~10)% of IL,
This work was supported in part by National Natural Science Fund (No.
50277039) and Hunan Province Electric Science and Technology Fund(No.
2003024).
Deng Wei is with the School of Electrical Engineering, Wuhan University,
Wuhan, 430072, China. (e-mail: dengwei001@163.com).
Liu Weidong is with the Hunan Extra High Voltage Transmission and
Substation Company, Changsha, 410015, China.(e-mali: liuweidonghn@sohu.
com).
Fu Zhiyang is with the Hunan Extra High Voltage Transmission and
Substation Company, Changsha, 410015, China.
Cao Jian is with the Central South university, Changsha, 410083, China.

0-7803-9114-4/05/$20.00 2005 IEEE.

the test signal can easily be interfered by the severe

electromagnetic interference in 500kV surrounding. Till now,
no on-line monitoring system for 500kV ZnO surge arresters
has been field-tested satisfactorily;
ii) The characteristic of the sensor. The most widely used
active sensor could easily be damaged in the open air, which
makes the data unstable and reveals low reliability;
iii) the limitation of the function of the on-line monitoring
equipment. Most of them cant be operated in the electric net
all day long, or they just detect one arrester or one parameter
one time.
In this paper, a new network-model on-line monitoring
system for 500 kV ZnO surge arresters is introduced.
Operated in the 500 kV Yuntian substation, it has shown its
high anti-interference ability and reliable performance.
Furthermore, it can be used freely among the 3 modes of local
test, remote test and automatic test to realize the goal of full
automation.

II. PRINCIPLE OF ON-LINE MONITORING SYSTEM

A. Selection and On-line Monitoring Methods
There are various on-line monitoring methods for the Zno
surge arresters, including: entire current monitoring method,
vector compensation monitoring method, third harmonic
current measuring method, third harmonic current
compensation monitoring method, resistive basic harmonic
current measuring method and so on[1,2]. Through synthetic
consideration, the resistive basic harmonic current measuring
method is preferable in the field test for the following reasons:
i) Efficient restraint from harmonics .The harmonic part (Irn)
of the leakage current(Ir) comes from the nonlinear
characteristic of ZnO under high voltage, or directly from the
applied voltage viz. Irn=f(R,Un). No matter how Ir differs with
the harmonics in power, the basic harmonic current part(Ir1)
remains fixed, which will provide a reliable judgement for online monitoring.
ii) More practical meaning[4]. Suppose the applied voltage
U = U m sin t , then the power losses of ZnO slice is
expressed as in (1).
T

P=

UI r = U m sin t ( I r 1m sint + I r 3 m sin(3t + 3 )

0

+ L + I rnm sin( n t + n )) dt

(1)

According to the orthogonal function theory, except for

the first nominal, the integral of the rest equals to zero, which

shows only the basic harmonic contributes to the power losses.

As the high harmonic component of the applied voltage is so
small (1%~2%), it has been omitted in the above equation.
iii) Elimination of interphase interference. Once the Zno
surge arresters are installed, the interphase interferences are
fixed. For instance, the deflection angle of basic harmonic
current of phase A under interphase interference can be
calculated as in (2).
= ( 120/ 2
( 2)
11

where 11 is the phase difference of the entire basic

harmonic current between phase A and C. The symmetrical
function of phase A and C makes the deflection angle zero in
phase B. With the technology of digital harmonic analysis, the
deflection angle can be detected and corrected.
B. Improvement for Resistive Basic Harmonic Current
Measuring Method
i) Unique device for signal acquisition. While the sensor is
connected in series in the gounding line near the flang,
overvoltage will occur in the event of open circuit. In this
paper, the sensor is connected in parallel with the counter,
shown in Fig.1. During the nomal operation, the leakage
current flows through the sensor and the signal is proportional
to the leakage current; In the surge events, high current with
kiloamperes will be held back by a special reactance so that
the counter can acts normally and the safety of measuring
equipment and users is being established.

Fig. 2. Angle difference between IL and ILC

iii) Integrated anti-interference method. The adoption of

photoelectric coupler and multistage filter, along with the high
speed switcher for time-sharing system, will make it efficient
to eliminate the inherent error between the test signal and the
reference signal. The application of differential detection and
mean value effect in the software will be helpful to eliminate
the unreasonable data. At the same time, the sensors with
excellent linear characteristic and double layer shielded cable
are selected in the monitoring system.
Compared with the traditional preventive experiment, the
on-line monitoring will pay more attention to the trend of the
data changes that occur gradually, along with the relative
quantity among the equipments of the same type. Therefore,
the more data and more quantity of the resemble equipments
are acquired, the more reliable the testing result is.

III. SYSTEM DESIGN

A. Hardware Structure
The on-line monitoring system mainly composes of 6
parts, including: signal acquisition, signal processing, selfcalibration, memorizer, telecommunication and printer unit.
The common structure of hardware is shown in Fig.3.

Fig. 1. Signal acquisition system

ii) Selection of reference signal. In order to detect the

leakage current IL, the base voltage signal are commonly
applied from the second winding of the transformer (TV),
which has the disadvantage of anger difference error and poor
security. To this issue, reference signals are got from the
leakage current (ILC) of the 500 kV coupling capacitor(CC) in
this paper, shown in Fig.2. As the dielectric loss angle of CC
is so small(0.1%~0.2%), the angle between ILC and IL nearly
equals to the dielectric loss angle of the ZnO surge arrester. In
doing so, the precision and stability of monitoring have been
greatly improved.

Fig. 3. Structure of hardware

To decide whether the applied voltage or the inner

insulation fault has caused the increase of leakage current, the
measurement of phase voltage is introduced in the on-line
monitoring system. In addition, the insulation characteristic is
influenced by the ambient temperature or humidity, so the
temperature sensor and the humidity sensor are used
outside[3]. When the leakage current has exceeded a certain
threshold value, this system can raise alarm and at the same
time the information sent to the management center.

B. User-friendly Software System

T h e s o f t w a r e s ys t e m c a n b e d i v i d e d i n t o 3
p a r t s a s w e l l , i n c l u d i n g t h e ma c h i n e c o n t r o l
s o f t w a r e f o r d a t a a c q u i s i t i o n a n d a n a l ysi s , t h e
s e r v e r c o n t r o l s o f t w a r e f o r t e l e c o mmu n i c a t i o n
and WEB server software for data and state
i n f o r ma t i o n r e l e a s e . A l l t h e s e h a v e r e f l e c t e d t h e
c h a r a c t e r i s t i c o f h u ma n iz a t i o n , i n t e l l i g e n c e a n d
n e t w o r k . T h e mai n f u n c t i o n mo d u l e s o f t h e
s o f t w a r e s ys t e m i n c l u d e : Mai n p r o g r a m, i n t e r r u p t
procedure, data acquisition, data filter, phase
d i f f e r e n c e c o l l e c t i o n , c o mp u t a t i o n s u b p r o g r a m
and so on, shown in Fig.4.

IV. FIELD TESTING

To test the accuracy of the on-line monitoring system,
some field test was made for the comparison between the online monitoring system and LCM II leakage current monitor .
The test result is shown in Tab. I.
TABLE. I
FIELD TEST FOR THE COMPARISON BETWEEN LCM
MONITORING SYSTEM

II MONITOR AND ON-LINE

Amplitude of resistive current

type
LCM II
monitor
On-line
monitoring
system

Resistive current
Ir(mA)

Total current
Ix(mA)
0.913

1.243

1.574

1.991

0.104

0.147

0.185

0.235

0.91

1.25

1.59

2.01

0.10

0.15

0.19

0.24

From Table I, the data of Ix and Ir between the two facilities

differ by 1% and 4% respectively, which shows the high
accuracy of the on-line monitoring system.
The on-line monitoring system was put into operation in
500kV Yuntian substation in August, 2002, detecting 17
group Zno surge arresters. Till now, it runs in a good
condition with stable data and strong anti-interference ability
to electromagnetic. The data curve of the 500kV line Minyun
is showed in Fig.6.

Fig. 4. Ma i n f u n c t i o n m o d u l e s o f t h e s o f t w a r e

C. Network Mmodel System

The management center of the online monitoring system
is the database server acting as the system data source. The
data source can be visited by the End-User through the LAN
or MIS system. The whole monitoring system is made up of
local detect unit and substation monitoring unit. The local
controller (LC) is mounted at the arrestors for the signal
acquisition and I/V transform. The substation monitoring unit
works as a signal processor, where the data are evaluated and
graphically displayed in the screen and stored on the disk.
Through the public telephone network or MIS in electric
power, these data can be sent to the server far away. The
whole structure of the network model system is shown in
Fig.5. It is opened in read-only or maintenance way according
to different users, which has greatly lightened the burden of
the net and improved the efficiency of the whole system.

Fig. 6. Data curve of the monitoring

V. CONCLUSION
1) Among the various monitoring methods for ZnO surge
arresters, the resistive basic harmonic current measuring
method is preferable to judge the degradation of the arresters
by eliminating the severe electromagnetic interference;
2) The reference signals are obtained from the leakage
current of CC instead of from the second winding of the TV,
which can greatly improve the precision and stability of
monitoring ;
3) The application of unique device for signal acquisition,
with passive sensor in parallel with the counter, can detect the
leakage current in normal operation as well as hold back the
current with kiloamperes by a special reactance so that the
counter can acts normally;
4) Integrated anti-interference method along with
technology of telecommunication have achieved the goal of
net-work model system, which can be used freely among the

Fig. 5. Strcture of the network model system

three modes of local test, remote test and automatic test to

build a good basis for the condition based maintenance
strategy.
REFERENCES
[1]

[2]

[3]
[4]

T. Klein, W. Kohler, K. Feser, W. Schmidt, and R. Bebensee, "A new

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Conference Publication, No.467) vol. 2, pp.301-304,1999 .
Guangchun Zhang, Xiaoyang tong, Siyi Zou, and Xiongwei Jiang, "A
noval insulation on-line monitoring and fault diagnosis system used for
traction substation," in Proc. 2002 IEEE International Symposium on
Electrical Insulation., pp.199-202.
T.Taskin , "Introduction of a measurement system to monitor the
condition of ZnO surge arresters," in Proc.2000 IEEE Power
Engineering Society Winter Meeting.,vol.3, pp.1553-1557.
Zhongru Shen , Hui Ding, and Futian Guo, "Study of the instruments for
monitoring the state of the zinc-oxide surge arrestors on line," Journal of
Xi'an Jiaotong University, vol. 30, n 12, pp. 21-26,Dec. 1996 .

VI. BIOGRAPHIES
Deng Wei was born in Hunan, China, on June 10,
1973. He received his bachelor degree in Xian
Jiaotong university in 1995 and his master degree in
Hunan university in 2002, and now studies at the
Wuhan University for doctors degree. His
employment experience included the Hunan extra
high voltage transmission and distribution company.
His special fields of interest includs overvoltage and
on-line monitoring. He was once the Project Director
for the on-line monitoring system of Zno arresters in
2002.