Traditional fault diagnosis methods for mineral oil-immersed power transformer based on dissolved gas analysis: Past, present and future

Abstract

A key factor in ensuring the efficient and safe operation of power transformers is the early and accurate diagnosis of incipient faults. Among the tools available to achieve this goal, dissolved gas analysis (DGA) is widely used by power transformers' maintenance professionals. It is a preventive maintenance tool, used for condition monitoring, fault diagnosis and unplanned outage prevention. With the development of artificial intelligence (AI), many intelligent-based methods using AI tools have been proposed in the literature for DGA data interpretation. Although these methods achieve high diagnostic accuracies and improve DGA efficiency, they are generally complicated and the research documented in these publications is difficult to replicate. Traditional DGA-based methods are simple, easy to understand and implement, and widely used by power transformers' maintenance professionals. Many methods proposed in recent years overcome the limitations of the pioneer methods and are increasingly effective. The authors present a detailed and comprehensive literature review of the traditional DGA-based methods for mineral oil-immersed power transformer faults diagnosis. This review also addresses ways to improve the efficiency of the available traditional methods. Some pitfalls that need to be taken into account to improve the efficiency of the DGA-based diagnostic methods are also presented.