Research of on-line monitoring equipment for power capacitor based on wireless sensor network

As the main electrical component for the reactive power compensation, the power capacitors are widely applied in many fields. And since the insulation condition of power capacitor could be identified accurately by using the on-line monitoring system, it attracts more and more attentions in recent years. In this paper, a novel on-line monitoring equipment for power capacitor based on wireless sensor network is presented. The operation data which includes the current and voltage of every capacitor is collected at first, and then the FFT is utilized to calculate the amplitude and phase of every signal, thus the insulation condition and the fault symptom could all be diagnosed accurately by analyzing the FFT results. In order to realize the effective isolation and the reliable communication between the sensing part and the merging unit, the wireless sensor network is adopted. The high reliability and transmission rate could be realized by using 2.4GHz UHF and 5GHz ISM radio bands. Thus the on-line monitoring system could be manufactured, and the lab test is carried at last. The testing results illustrate that this system could satisfy the requirement of on-site real-time measurement.