A High Sensitivity Optical Fiber Sensor for GIS Partial Discharge Detection

We propose a high sensitivity optical fiber sensor for detecting the acoustic emission generated by the partial discharge in gas-insulated-switchgear (GIS). A model is established to investigate the effects of the cylinder coil on the sensitivity, the bandwidth, and the detection limit. After that, the proposed sensor was modified based on the effects. The average sensitivity of the optimized acoustic emission (AE) optical fiber sensor is 32 dB higher than that of the conventional lead zirconate titanate (PZT) in the frequency range from 20 kHz to 100 kHz. Moreover, the experimental results show that the detectable partial discharge initial voltage for the proposed optical system is 17.1% lower than that for the PZT system, and the amplitude of the signal detected by the proposed optical system is 525% higher than that detected by the PZT system.