Outdoor insulators are crucial elements to the overall reliability of the power system. Most of the failures of overhead lines are due to outdoor insulators internal or external failure. Hence, development of new techniques to detect outdoor insulators failures is important to the utility engineers.

In this presentation, different artificial intelligent based inspection techniques will be presented. Two examples from both outdoor ceramic and non-ceramic insulators will be used to demonstrate the use of artificial intelligent based techniques for the purpose of condition monitoring of outdoor insulators. For non-ceramic insulators the use of near-field microwave non-destructive inspection will be presented to detect different internal failures. Also, image processing will be used to evaluate the surface condition of non-ceramic insulators by estimating the hydrophobicity status. On the other hand, the use of RF antenna to detect different forms of damage in ceramic insulators will be addressed. Moreover, an innovative image processing based technique to estimate the pollution accumulation on ceramic insulators will be presented.

Location:
Ottawa, Ontario