IEEE lnstumentation and Measurement Technology Conference Ottawa, Canada, May 19-21, 1997

Application of Design Of Experiment techniques to measurement procedures. An exam le of optimisation applied to the digital measurement of partial discharges.
R.Bozzo, G.Coletti, C.Gemme, F.Guastavino
Electrical Engineering Department University of Genova 16145 Genova - ITALY Phone +39 10 3532 725 Fax +39 10 3532 700 E-Mail: bozzo@die.unige.it

Abstract In the last decade, multistage digital measuring systems of partial discharges (PDs) have been introduced, allowing to support the diagnostic of defects (sites of PDs) in power electric components. They transfer information about defects from full data sets of PD patterns, obtained from a Phase Resolved Partial Discharge Analyser (PRPDA) to reduced data sets, by implementing pattern recognition techniques. The latter data sets are then classified versus similar reference data sets, The validity of the above diagnostic requires that the measuring process, which is influenced by several factors, is optimised. The three main settings of the PRPDA are among such factors of influence, but so far, as a simple mathematical model of this measuring process is not available, it has not been possible to quantitatively a s s their weight on the validity ses of above diagnostic. This work presents a successful Design Of Experiments (DOE) approach to solve the latter problem. The DOE analysis of the results of 81 PD tests performed on a simple physical model of an insulation system quantified the weight and the interaction of the three factors and allowed to derive criteria for selecting the optimal values of such factors and the optimal9composition of the reduced data sets. I.INTRODUCTION. An electrical discharge which affects only a part of an insulating gap, without giving rise to an immediate breakdown is named a partial discharge (PD) and can be detected through non destructive techniques. The presence of PDs in the insulating system of a power component is very often associated to the presence of defects, i.e. of sites where the mass density is, or becomes, similar to the one of a gas and where the local electric field is higher than the local

dielectric strength. Usually in high voltage power (HVP) components the PD measurement is performed by means of electrical techniques, using standardized analog procedures [I]or non-standardized digital approaches. As the named defects become potential causes of HVP components early failures in service (when the PDs show an amplitude higher than a threshold level which is specific to each type of component), the PDs measurement is usually part of the manufacturing quality evaluation plan of such components. The implementation of the latter measurements through digital techniques (usually a Phase Resolved Partial Discharges Analyzer PRPDA) allows to store data sets (PD patterns) which contain implicit information about the type and location of the relevant defects (sites of PDs). Different advanced preprocessing techniques (based on statistical procedures or on expert systems or on Neural Network approaches, etc.) can be applied to such data in order to efficiently render explicit the above information. The data recorded for implementing the above quality evaluation procedures can be complemented with the output of the latter techniques application, to support the implementation of diagnostics aimed at identifying the causes of the HVP components defects. Fig.1

defect

unknown
current

se/ected factors of/nf/uence

voltage Pulse

defect iype and loccltion

reduced
dataset

I II

pa

PD

stage1 stage2 st-3

st-4

reference
reduced data set
Fig.1. Block diagram of the PDs measuring process supporting the diagnostic of high voltage power components

0-7803-3312-8/97/$5.0001997 IEEE

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illustrates the block diagram of the measuring process, from the PDs manifested by defects to the final diagnosis. While the solutions to the first two stages problems of accuracy are well known, the validity of the final inferences generally depends also on other factors (as, for instance, the settings of the PRPDA), whose influence has been proved, but could not, so far, be quantified. This work presents an application of "Design Of Experiment" (DOE) techniques which allowed to quantify the PRPDA settings influence on the validity of HVP components diagnostics, based on the PD patterns analysis.
II. THE MEASURANDAND THE MEASUREMENTS

One such PD acquisition leads, taking in due account the relevant problems of accuracy, to the storage of the following three basic quantities, per each amplitude and phase cell (iJ), where i and j identify one of the available h amplitude and k phase windows:

NI = number of discharges stored in the -ij cell

Qi = i-th amplitude of the discharge occurred in the j-th phase window
qj = phase of occurrence of Qi

The complete set of such data acquired during a preset acquisition time is the PR pattern. At this third stage takes place an information transfer, which is influenced by several factors (e.g. the PRDPA settings, the specific power component, the testing conditions and/or unknown factors) which can alter [3,4], in an unknown way, also the contents,regarding type and location of defects. The PD pattern data set becomes an intermediate measurand, heuristic pattern recognition techniques are introduced and the measuring process ends with the comparison of an "unknown" PD pattern with "reference" PD patterns (obtained for different components having known defects, or for a similar component under different conditions). Therefore the validity of the measuring process is determined by its ability to correctly classify the actual measurands (defects) in different classes: a complete PD measuring system which produces correct classifications of defects can be considered "optimized". The latter stage of the measuring process includes a preprocessing (data compression) stage, where some significant features are extracted from the measurand, implementing one (or more) of the techniques reported in the introduction, and are gathered in a reduced data set (usually about 5-20 data). If such techniques are "non-lossy" (i.e. if their output contains all the sought information which is present in the input), the comparisons between such reduced numerical sets can be equivalent to the comparisons between the relevant PD patterns full data sets. Experience has shown that the "optimal" choice of the quantities composition of such reduced sets depends on the type of power component [Z] and on the purposes of the diagnostics: sometimes different compositions are equally valid. A number of suitable "computational strategies", are then available to implement the last stage of the measuring process: the classification. Any such

Basically [2], a PD can be considered a sudden transfer of actual charge, which produces a fast current pulse, modifies the voltage across a partial capacitance (a small region of an IS), propagates along the IS and can be detected as a voltage pulse (the PD signal) across the terminals of the power component. An unknown timevariant transfer function F I , which depends also on the position of the PD site, can be attributed to this first signal processing stage. The PD signal is then fed into a detection circuit (see a simplified version in Fig.2) and the relevant current i(t) produces a voltage pulse Vz(t) across an impedance Zm. While a second transfer function F2 can be attributed to this stage and is "measurable" (through a so called "calibration* procedure), the peak of the latter pulse is proportional to the time integral of i(t), named "apparent charge" Q. Q can be shown to be independent of the pulse shape, is related to the original current pulses through F1 and F2, can be analogically measured with a degree of uncertainty (and a traceability) acceptable for quality assurance purposes and it represents the pulse amplitude. At the next stage the signal is processed through a PRDPA, where the voltage Vz(t) is amplified, sent to an A/D converter, quantized and stored, together with the quantized phase of the supply voltage at the instant of the pulse occurrence. At each cycle, under ac conditions, each defect can originate several different pulses, whose irregular distribution with time is considered to be related to the type of defect. Therefore, in order to acquire statistically significant data, it is necessary to process in this way all the pulses detected during a sufficiently long (> about 100 cycles) acquisition time.
HIGH VOLTAGE

Fig.2 Schematic diagram of a PD detection circuit

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strategy needs a fine tuning to select the most appropriate classification criteria.
A. Optimisation of a PD Measuring System: a simple example

disregarded the possible influence of factors different from the PRPDA dead time) was implemented.
B. The Addressed Problem

Experience has shown [3] that, in order to achieve a valid diagnostic when using digital PD measuring systems, the dead time (td) of the PRDPA is to be higher than the settling time of the PD signal (mainly determined by Zm). If this condition is not satisfied the PRDPA output (the PD patterns) will not contain a correct information about the investigated defect@). Fig. 3 illustrates a case where a same defect (an electrical tree), processed by the same measuring circuit (same Zm and same PRDPA settings, except td), originated two different PD patterns for two different values of td (note that in the original pictures the PDs amplitude data were colour coded): one typical of an electrical tree (td = I O ps) and one typical of a void (td = 5 ps). The approach to correct this situation, after its detection, was very simple because only the effects (on the diagnostic assessment) of the variation of the dead time factor was considered and because a direct (visual) comparison of the PD patterns was sufficiently significant. While, in general, the Zm is to be modified (within limits) in order to render the settling time lower than td, in the specific PRPDA instrument used in this work, td could be easily chosen in a range of preset values. Therefore a series of tests could be run in a very short time, the influence of the td factor on the PD measurements output was promptly quantified and, choosing the lowest possible value of td, a step towards the measuring system optimisation (which

In practice, the approaches to shorten the distance of a PD measuring system from its optimal operation, unfortunately, can be more complex: the factors of influence (and their interaction) are to be identified and the relevant influence is to be quantified, in order to enable the implementation (and the validation) of correcting measures. For instance, some of the authors have demonstrated [3] that the following factors, among other ones, can influence the PD patterns and so can affect the validity of the final PD based diagnostics of an insulation system: a) the acquisition time tacq, whose value can affect the PRPDA output b) the PRPDA amplifier gain: the choice of its value can be critical, owing to the opposite effects of the amplifier saturation and of the quantisation error on the PD pattern c) when a Low Level Discriminator (LLD) digital filter is introduced to avoid saturation of the number of channels due to noise, the choice of its cut-off level, obviously does affect the PD pattern However no method was available to determine, a priori and quantitatively, the extent of the above three factors influence on the final results and to evaluate the possible relevance of their interaction. In the present work, the above mentioned PD patterns data compression was operated by means of statistical procedures applied to the following derived quantities, calculated from the basic quantities of the PD patterns:

I
Figure 3 Examples of PD patterns. On the left it is reported a correctly acquired pattem (td = 10 ms) for an electrical treeing phenomenon. On the right it is reported a wrongpattern (td = 5 ms), obtained on the same site, which suggeststhe existenceof a void

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i=h+l j=1 2

total charge, positive and negative

(3)

ranges of variation) have been selected, while all the other influences on the actual process have been assumed to be noise. - a plan (design) of the experiments to be performed has been outlined, following the rules of DOE, which evidence the minimum number of combinations of the Controllable Factors values the analysis of results has been shaped to evidence the validity of the Controllable Factors selection, the degree of influence (the weight) of each factor on the output and the weight of the selected factors synergetic action on the output.

average positive and negative charge (referred to the acquisition time) or PD current. While from each PD pattern, several frequency histograms can be computed together with the relevant statistic parameters such as Mean, Median, Mode, Variance, Skewness, Kurtosis, Cross Correlation Factor etc., for the purpose of the present work just the Hn(Q), frequency histogram of the number of negative discharges Ni(Q) as function of the amplitude Qi, and the Hn(@)-, frequency histogram of the number of negative discharges Ni(CD) as function of the phase @, have been considered, as they allow to identify and to characterise several defects in insulation systems [5,6].
C. The testing arrangement

The latter analysis allowed to quantitatively estimate the conditions necessary, but not sufficient, to achieve the optimisation of the PD measuring system for diagnostic purposes.

A. The DOE plan and the Experimental Results

In the present case the input variables were the PD themselves. 1 1 quantities (statistical parameters) derived from the PD patterns have been selected as output variables and the controllable factors were: A) the acquisition time for each PD pattern B) the amplifier gain C) the setting of the Low Level Discriminator (LLD) filter A complete factorial 33 plan has been chosen, where 3 possible levels for each controllable factor have been considered (see Table I). As three tests (replication = 3) were to be performed far each planned combination of such factors, the experiment regarded a total of 81 tests.
TABLE I SELECTED LEVELS FOR THE CONTROLLING FACTORS

A very simplified model of an insulation system was obtained realizing a PD test cell, detailed in [7], which hosted thin polymer films. For the purposes of this work, surface PD tests have then been performed on polyethilenterephtalate (PET) films using such a cell. A 50 pm thick film was placed, in a sphere-plane geometry, between the spherical electrode (CD = 6 mm, set, in air, at 0.1 +/- 0.01 mm distance from the film) and the plane electrode, a 2.4 kV ac voltage was applied and the PD patterns were acquired under controlled conditions. Ill. THE ADOPTED DOE APPROACH A solution to the addressed problem has been found implementing Design Of Experiment (DOE) techniques. Since decades, industrial problems of critical parameters optimisation, connected to total quality, to products development and to cost-and-time reductions are often addressed applying the DOE techniques [8]. In a general situation, the output variables of an idealized process depend on the input variables, on a set of controllable factors (factor of influence) and on a set of non-controllablefactors (noise factors). The here adopted DOE approach can be summarised as follows: the Input variables, the Output variables and the set of Controllable Factors (together with the relevant

FACTORS Time (s)

I
I

LOW 10

ICENTRALIHIGH 95 I 180

Each test was represented by a PD pattern and by the relevant values of the 11 output variables. All the tests results, i.e. the values of each selected output variable for each planned combination of factors and levels, have been processed by means of analysis of variance (ANOVA) techniques (implemented through off the shelf software packages). Hereby 3 examples relevant to 3 different output variables are reported. Example 1) Output variable: I+ . Th; ANOVA procedure evidenced that the highest R indicator (which can be considered representative of the ratio between the variability of results due to the assumed statistical model and the actual variability of results) was obtained for the second order statistical model. Its

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value (0.95) indicated that the selected factors were actually the main factors of influence. Then the weight of the controllable factors (A = acquisition time; B = gain; C = LLD level) , of the relevant quadratic terms (AA, BB, CC) and of the first order interactions (AB, BC, AC) was computed and visualised. A Pareto chart (see Fig. 4) evidenced both that the effects of tacq were far less important than the effects of the other two main factors and that the effect of interactions was negligible. Besides a plot of the main effects (of these three factors on the I+ output variable) vs. the relevant ranges of variation outlined (see Fig. 5) both the unexpected presence (probably due to the effects of the quantization error) of a maximum for a gain value of about 8 and the expected (almost linear) decrease of the LLD level effect. Therefore, in this case, the presence of the variable I+ in a set of output variables, was to be "optimised" by setting the gain at 8 and the LLD level as low as possible. Besides, while the influence of the interaction between the investigated factors could be disregarded, the influence on the final diagnostics of tacq deserved further investigation, because, during the previous experiment the variation of factors B and C could have "masked" the effects of factor A. Actually further PD tests run under identical conditions, varying only tacq, keeping the other factors constant at the above optimised values, did reveal that the factor A had a "modest" influence on the output I+,up to a

saturation value of 100 s. As higher tacq values did not cause any change in such an output, the "optimal" tacq value was to be set at 100s. In general, the latter reasoning is to be checked against the possibility that the phenomena underlying the PDs are time-varying. In this specific case, concerning surface PDs acting on a specific polymer film, auxiliary PD aging tests showed that such phenomena could be considered not varying, provided that the tacq was assumed in the range of 40 s. Example 2) Output variable: Skewness of the Hn(Q)distribution (SkHnQ-). The ANOVA procedure evidenced that the highest R2 indicator was obtained for the second order statistical model. Its value (0.84) indicated that the selected factors were acceptably descriptive of the phenomena involved. An interaction between the factors gain and LLD level, was at first evidenced by the crossing of the BC curves in Fig. 6. Its relevance was quantified by computing the weight of the factors B, BB and BC influence ONB, WBB, Wac) on this output variable, the limit significance level of such weight (WLS)and the highest weight of the which were reported in Table 11. other factors (WO~),
TABLE II WEIGHT OF 2ND ORDER STATITICAL MODEL FACTORS ON OUTPUT VARIABLE SkHnQ-

I
C:LLD
B:Gain BB A:Time
0
4

WLS

WE
19

WB0

9.5

1.5

- the factor gain was not linearly related to the output

variable, as confirmed by the main effects plot in Fig. 7, which revealed that the influence of the factor gain had a minimum at a value of about 8 the choice of the LLD level and of the tacq values (within the here considered ranges) would have produced little or no significant effect on the shape of the Hn(Q)- distribution, therefore would not have affected the validity of a relevant diagnostics, based on the output variable SkHnQ-

Such results indicated that:

12

16

20

24

Standardized effect
Fig. 4 Pareto chart for the output variable I*

Standardized main effects (arbitrary units)

Degree of Interaction (arbitary units)

Fig. 5 Main effects plot for the output variable I+

Fig. 6 Interaction plot for output variable SkHnQ-

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Main Effects (arbitrary units)

23
2.1 1.9
1.7
10.0 180.0 4.0 10.0 1.0

defects [5,6,9], assumed in the last stage of the measuring process, are appropriate allows to formulate some criteria of selection of the factors of influence which would minimize the possible introduction of artificial errors when operating a comparison between PD patterns obtained in different testing conditions

IV. CONCLUSIONS
10.0

Tacq

Gain

LLD

Fig. 7 Main effects plot for the output variable SkHnQ-

the adoption of different pairs of B and of C values during a comparison between PD measurements on equal HVP components would have artificially (although slightly) affected the measurement of the Hn(Q)- distribution, thus, possibly, the relevant PD based diagnostic would have classified the two objects as different ones. Therefore the DOE analysis pointed out that, inserting the output variable SkHnQ- in the reduced data set composition would have required to fix the LLD level and the gain value for all the future diagnostic determinations on similar objects (i.e. to cancel such factors from the group of the controllable variables), in minimize the possibility of an incorrect diagnosis. Example 3) Output variable: Kurtosis of the Hn(@)distribution (KuHncD-). The ANOVA procedure evidenced that the highest R2 indicator was obtained for a third order statistical model. Its value (0.43) indicated that the phenomena involved in the average distribution of PDs occurence along a half-cycle of the frequency were driven also by other factors, different from the three selected ones. Therefore the DOE analysis evidenced that the KuHncD- output variable was not be enclosed in the final reduced data set of a PD based diagnostic, without investigating the influences of other factors.
B. Comments

The present work indicates that the adoption of DOE (Design Of Experiment) techniques allows to obtain quantitative assessments about the influence of the settings of a partial discharges (PD) digital measuring system on the results of the PD patterns analysis. Such information can help the optimisation procedure of a PD measurement system aimed at the diagnostic of power components. Although these techniques have been successfully tested only in simple cases (surface PDs on polymer films), its application to the diagnostic of actual insulating systems (power electrical components) by means of PD digital acquisitions appears to be positively promising. Furthermore the DOE techniques, which can be considered particularly efficient applications of statitistics, appear to have the potentiat for a wider application, especially to the optimisation of measurement systems, when no simple models of the physic processes are available. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authors acknowledge the support of MURST 40% funds to the present work. REFERENCES
[ I ] IEC Publication 270 [2] GZingales: discussion about article Digital processing of PD pulses, by P.OsvBth, IEEE Trans. on Dielectrics and Electrical Insulation, vol. 2, august 1995, pp.688-691 [3] R. B w o . C. Gemme, F. Guastavino: The Influence of Digital Measurement System Characteristics on PD Patterns; Proc of CEIDP 95, Conf. Proceeding, Virginia Beach, VA, USA, October 22-25, 1995, pp. 347-352 [4] R.Bono, CGemme, F.Guastavino: The dependence of fingerprints relevant to PDs on degradation time and test voltage; Proc. of 1996 CEIDP, San Francisco, USA, October 20-23, 1996, pp. 500-503. [5]E.Gulski: Diagnosis of HV components by digital PD analyzer; IEEE Trans. on DEI, Vol. 2, August 1995, pp.630-640 [ I R.E.James, B.T.Phung:Development od computer-based S measurementsand their application to PD pattern analysis; IEEE Trans. on DEI, Vol. 2, October 1995, pp.838-856 R. Bono, L. Centurioni, F. Guastavino: Measuring the endurance of films in Partial Discharges. IEEE Trans. on Electrical Insulation, Vol. 28, Num. 5, Dicembre 1993, pp. 1050-1056 [8] D.C. Montgomery: Design and analysis of experiments,l991, J. Wiley&Sons, ISBN 0-471-52994-X [9] E.Gulski: Digital analysis of partial discharges; IEEE Trans. on DEI, Vol. 2, October 1995, pp.822-837

The information obtained through the implementation of the DOE techniques during PD measurements in power components can be useful in several ways. For instance: - it can suggest of setting the PD digital acquisition device at a certain working point [e.g. the maximum of gain or the acquisition time saturation value in example I),well as the minimum of gain in example as 2)], when it is desirable to improve the stability of the PD patterns for small variations of a specifc factor of infIuence - given a range of variation of the investigated factors, it allows to check wether the classification criteria of

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