Partial discharge (PD) often begins with cracks or gas-filled voids in solid insulation or with gaseous bubbles in liquid insulation. These presences can degrade the quality of insulator. PD detection can identify these cracks at high voltage equipment such as power cables and power transformer at the early stage. One of PD detection methods is acoustic emission (AE) detection. PD produces an ultrasonic signal that can be captured by an AE sensor. The signal captured is then analysed by capturing the time of the receiving signal onto the sensor. The information related to time can be used for allocating the PD for maintenance purpose. This paper shows the influence of the distance between PD source and the AE sensor towards the arrival time of propagation wave in power transformer. In this study, the four placements of sensors were analysed by having three possible PD sources to represent the variety of distances between the PD source and the sensor. The simulated signal is generated by MATLAB and the arrival time is captured using time of arrival (TOA) method. The time captured and the distance between the PD source and arrival time showed that the relationship is proportional to one another.
