Modelling of piezoelectric sensor based on ZnO material for partial discharge detection on power transformer

Detection of partial discharge (PD) in early stages able to reduce the risk of decommissioning of high voltage (HV) equipment. However, the conventional method for PD detection are not suitable for on-site measurement due to electrical disturbance. One of the method in detecting PD signal is piezoelectric based acoustic emission (AE) sensors. In this project, an AE sensor is modelled to obtain a PD signal in the range of 10 – 300 kHz occurred in HV transformer and been found out by simulation and analytical approach. Two models of a piezoelectric sensor with different types of cantilever and different dimension variation starting from 4 mm to 15 mm are designed in the Finite element Method (FEM) in order to investigate the resonant frequency which is matched to the range of AE detection. Zinc oxide (ZnO) as a piezoelectric material is proposed in this project due to its high piezoelectric coupling and environmentally friendly compared to the others material which is harmful. Based on the simulation result, ZnO piezoelectric sensor with the length of 5 mm and thickness of 0.451 mm generates 0.0537 mV electrical potentials under the resonant frequency of 155.30 kHz which is in the range of AE detection technique.