The Adoption of Best Practices for Insulation Condition Assessment and Condition Monitoring of OWF HVAC Export and MVAC Inter-array Cables: Preliminary Field Trial Results

摘要

The implementation of electrical condition monitoring (CM) technology in the offshore wind farm (OWF) industry has been limited to date. There is presently no system available in the market that can effectively perform the monitoring and correlation of several electrical condition parameters to enhance the insulation condition assessment (ICA) of the network. This paper is an extension of the work published by the authors in the 2013 EWEA Offshore Conference in Nov 2013 on the importance of 'holistic' insulation condition monitoring (CM) and testing, both at the commissioning/acceptance phase and then into the service life of the cable networks. To further improve the CM of the cable networks in the OWF market sector, the authors present a new system (OHVMS) that is capable of monitoring the state and condition of the network. This work presents the results from the field trial of this new technology. The system acquires and records, on a continuous basis, partial discharge (PD), power quality (PQ) and cable sheath currents (SC) data. The ongoing analysis of the data shows how correlating the effect of phenomena on differing parameters can help to increase the understanding of the real state of the systems, improving the Condition Based Management (CBM) of the assets. The data has been recorded on both 33kV inter-array cables and 132kV export cables on a number of UK offshore wind farms over a period of several months. A case study in which the system has helped to identify PD on an offshore site is reported herein.