A novel detection method based on derivative for thermal defects of electrical equipment

Thermal defects widely occur in electrical equipment and affect its stable operation. This paper proposes a novel detection method based on derivatives for thermal defects of electrical equipment. First, the equivalent models of the equipment are established to analyze the surface temperature formed by different defects. Second, the theoretical foundation of the derivative-based detection method is described, and numerical calculations on thermal defect detection based on derivative characteristic curves are carried out. The results show that the method can detect the position effectively and calculate the depth with an error of 1.6%. Then, the thermal defects in different situations are analyzed, and the results indicate that the method is effective in all cases. Finally, the experiment is conducted by artificially preparing samples with thermal defects, and the achieved calculation error of the experimental results is within 3.3%, which indicates the validity of this method.