Partial discharge measurement of power cables for nuclear power plant

Electric cables are one of the most important components in a nuclear power plant since they provide the power needed to operate electrical equipment. Despite their importance, cables typically receive little attention since they are considered passive, long-lived components that have been very reliable over the years when subjected to the environmental conditions for which they were designed. The operating experience reveals that a defect of the insulator or poor construction causes the initial failure of cable. However, the number of cable failures increase with plant aging, and these cable failures are occurring within the plants' 40-year licensed period. These cable failures have resulted in plant transients, shutdown, loss of safety functions or redundancy, entries into limiting conditions for operation, and challenges for plant operators. Therefore, diagnosis of MV cable installed in NPPs has become one of the most urgent issues in recent years. In accordance with PSR, condition maintenance for cables is also continuously required. Recently, HFPD tests have been widely performed to diagnose cable in the transmission and distribution cable system. However, on-line HFPD wasn't used in the NPPs because of the danger of plant shutdown, measurement sensitivity and application problems, etc. In this paper, HFPD measurement with portable device was performed to evaluate the integrity of the 4.16kV & 13.8kV cable lines. The test results show that HFPD is highly attractive to the diagnosis of MV cables in NPP by high detection sensitivity on-site.