A Study on the Acoustic Fault Detection System of Insulators from Their Radiation Noises

To detect the insulator in the fault state on the electric poles, we first measured radiation sounds from normal state insulators and error state insulators in the anechoic chamber. We processed the signals in frequency domain to find the features with filter bank, narrow band and wide band analysis. So we could found two apparent results from their frequency spectrums - one was 120Hz harmonic components, the other was high average noise level than normal state ones. Then we also introduced a technique for the direction detection of the fault state insulator using the cross correlation from the three dimensional array microphones. To eliminate the noise signal from unexpected directions, we suggested the zero padding technique in cross correlation function. From these, we could conclude that acoustic fault detection techniques are useful of the detection of insulators' faults and the estimation of the direction of the fault state insulators.