Application of the Acoustic Emission Method for Diagnosis of On-Load Tap Changer

This paper provides an example of the application of the acoustic emission (AE) method for the diagnosis of technical conditions of a three-phase on-load tap-changer (OLTC) GIII type. The measurements were performed for an amount of 10 items of OLTCs, installed in power transformers with a capacity of 250 MVA. The study was conducted in two different OLTC operating conditions during the tapping process: under load and free running conditions. The analysis of the measurement results was made in both time domain and time-frequency domain. The description of the AE signals generated by the OLTC in the time domain was performed using the analysis of waveforms and determined characteristic times. Within the time-frequency domain the measured signals were described by short-time Fourier transform spectrograms.