2013 IEEE 1st International Conference on Condition Assessment Techniques in Electrical Systems

Remote Condition Monitoring of High Voltage

Insulators Employing GSM Network
Riddhi Ghosh, Biswendu Chatterjee, Member, IEEE ,
Debangshu Dey, Member, IEEE and Sivaji Chakravorti, Senior Member, IEEE
Department of Electrical Engineering
Jadavpur University
Kolkata, India

Abstract— Remote condition monitoring of power apparatus lower order harmonic components of the above mentioned
is a much sought after research area at present. With the existing leakage current pattern serve as good parameters for condition
power network about to be upgraded to a smart grid system in monitoring of insulators [10].
the near future, remote condition monitoring will soon become a Most of the condition monitoring techniques offer analysis
critical aspect of the power network. With this in mind, a
tools, both online and offline, based on leakage current data
technique has been proposed in this paper, whereby it is possible
to transmit insulator leakage current signal over the GSM voice that is collected locally at site. But, power utilities have
channel as a means for low cost, yet state of the art, remote several substations that are distributed over a wide area. Thus
condition monitoring system. The scheme proposed in this paper condition monitoring based on localized data collection of
is developed in such a way that it is flexible enough to be almost unlimited number of insulators distributed over such a
applicable to condition monitoring of various power apparatus wide region is not a feasible solution. Under such
which employ power frequency signals as analysis tools. circumstances, remote monitoring of insulators will be a good
acceptable solution to the power utilities.
Keywords—insulator leakage current, harmonics, remote
As far as remote condition monitoring is concerned,
condition monitoring, GSM voice-channel, signal reconstruction
commercially available solutions are already available as a
I. INTRODUCTION package that employs a dedicated network. The Leakage
Current Monitoring System (LCMS) described in [11]
High voltage insulators are a major component of the
employs an optical fiber technology for the purpose of
electrical power system. The condition of in-service insulators
monitoring leakage current in high voltage insulators. The
in a power system has a considerable impact on the reliability
problem of employing such a dedicated network is the huge
of the entire system. Most of the insulators are mounted
cost involved in widespread implementation of such modules.
outdoors, and as such, are exposed to external atmospheric
Web-based technology is yet another possibility, but it
conditions throughout their entire service life. Thus, surface
necessitates the availability of web services at individual
contamination and moisture adsorption in aged insulators may
monitoring modules that are put into service.
lead to tracking and flashover under normal operating
On the other hand, mobile communication has undergone
conditions [1].
an exponential growth in recent years. Several transmitting
Aged insulators are prone to failure and hence, in turn,
towers, or cell sites together constitutes the cellular network
adversely affect the normal operation of the entire power
over which communications takes place. Modern day mobile
system. So, there is need for monitoring of the parameters that
communication network gives rise to the possibility of sending
are capable of indicating an impending failure of insulators in
technical data pertaining to the condition of equipment, over
the field. On account of the substantial research conducted in
the voice channel. The widespread use of mobile phones and
the field of insulator aging over the years, various techniques
abundance of cell towers means that no separate network
have been proposed for such insulator condition monitoring.
infrastructure is required for such applications. However,
It is well established in the literature that with aging, the
problems arise due to the fact that the voice channel of a GSM
leakage current through an insulator changes considerably [1-
mobile communications system is designed to carry voice-like
10]. Ideally, insulators, after their production, show excellent
signals, and not electrical signals. Hence some special
hydrophobicity. Under normal operating conditions, this
arrangement is required for sending the technical data over the
hydrophobic property is retained. With aging, hydrophobicity
voice channel.
gradually decreases and as a consequence, a thin film of water
Based on the above practical considerations, this paper
accumulates on the surface of the insulators. This leads to the
presents a scheme for monitoring the leakage current data of
increase of leakage current and dry-band arcing. Due to the
insulators through the GSM voice channel. The leakage
above phenomenon, leakage current pattern in insulators
current waveforms of the insulator are recorded in the
change with aging. Thus, leakage current pattern can serve as
laboratory. Some typical features are extracted from the
a good indicator for assessing the aging condition in
acquired leakage current waveforms. Data, pertaining to these
insulators. El-Hag et al. showed that the fundamental and
typical features are modulated onto speech-like symbols.
This work has been supported by UPE Phase-II, Jadavpur University.

978-1-4799-0083-1/13/$31.00 ©2013 IEEE CATCON2013

 2013 IEEE 1st International Conference on Condition Assessment Techniques in Electrical Systems
These speech-like symbols are then fed to the microphone of a
low-cost commonly available GSM mobile phone. When a
voice call is established, the speech-like symbols are
conveniently transmitted just like any other voice signal. At
the receiving end, the received signal is demodulated to
reconstruct the original leakage current waveform.
II. NON-SPEECH SIGNAL TRANSMISSION OVER GSM
VOICE-CHANNEL
The GSM voice channel is designed to carry signals having
frequencies between 300 Hz and 3 kHz. Using this limited
bandwidth to transmit electrical signals is a challenging task,
since most of the electrical signals will fall outside this
bandwidth. The leakage current waveform of insulators that is
to be transmitted is a signal with a fundamental frequency of
50 Hz and will be blocked by the GSM voice-channel.
Besides, the GSM channel can transmit only those signals
which possess speech-like characteristics, and will distort all
non-speech waveforms.
Different speech compression techniques are employed by
the GSM terminal to extract speech-specific features from a
speech signal. These parameters are pitch, energy and human
vocal tract model, henceforth termed as speech parameters in
the paper. The input speech is split up into small frames of the
order of 20-30 ms, and the characteristics are extracted from
each windowed input speech signal through the application of
appropriate speech production models [12]. It is only these
speech parameters that are sent over the voice channel. At the
receiving end GSM terminal, the speech parameters are used
to reconstruct the original input speech signal by reversing the
process. When speech is transmitted through normal voice
channel in a cellular network, at the receiving end the speech
signal is reconstructed to have a similar aural perception as the
original speech. However, sample-by-sample matching with
the original wave is never obtained in such transmission. Thus,
electrical signals that do not possess speech characteristics
will fail to pass through such an intricate system. This
manifests as the biggest problem in transmitting any non-
speech signal over the GSM voice channel.
Keeping the above mentioned fact in mind, in order to send
technical information that is not speech-like, a suitable
modulator is required that will transform the input signal into a
speech-like waveform. As an alternative to the data channel,
parallel methods have been proposed for transmitting non-
speech information over the voice-channel in the area of digital
data transmission [13-15]. Most of these papers are based on
the design of a set of speech-like symbols of pre-fixed length
through the use of speech production models. The input bit
stream is encoded onto the speech-like symbols, which is then
fed to the GSM terminal. Each of the symbols will thus
represent a certain fixed number of data bits. At the receiving
end, the received symbols are analyzed and the ‘most likely
symbol’ that was transmitted, is determined on the basis of
code book search. The data bit stream is then extracted from
the received symbol. In this work, the aforesaid technique for
digital data transmission has been employed to transmit
technical information over the GSM network.
293
III. ELECTRICAL SIGNAL TRANSMISSION USING GSM VOICE
CHANNEL
The difficulty in transmitting electrical signals over the
GSM voice channel is that the information contained within a
continuous analog signal is too vast to be conveniently
compressed into a finite set of speech-like symbols of
comparable signal length. As such, the mentioned codebook
search approach to detect minimum deviation between received
and sent symbols is difficult to apply in the scheme of insulator
leakage current monitoring. Accordingly, the scheme needs to
be modified to take care of the information loss in the received
signal. Hence, the subsequent sub-sections discuss a modified
scheme whereby it is possible to send power frequency leakage
current signals over the GSM voice channel.
A. Theoretical Background of Leakage Current Pattern
As mentioned already in Section I, El-Hag et al.
demonstrated that the low frequency components in the leakage
current serve as good indicators of insulator surface
degradation [10]. Insulator aging is accompanied by an
increase in the relative magnitudes of lower order harmonic
components along with the power frequency signal as obtained
in the leakage current waveform. This increase in lower order
harmonic components results in significant distortions in the
original wave shape of leakage current. So, changes in the
leakage current waveshape can be well correlated to the surface
degradation in an insulator, especially in polymer derivatives.
Thus, it may be inferred that changes in the leakage current
pattern are caused by changes in the amplitude and phase of its
harmonics. Therefore, in order to transmit and faithfully
reproduce the leakage current waveform, more emphasis is
given so that the amplitude and phase of the harmonic content
of the original leakage current waveform is preserved.
B. Experimental Arrangement
A Personal Computer (PC) was used to modulate the
recorded leakage current data pattern into a signal suitable for
transmission over the GSM voice channel. The PC is connected
to a low-cost GSM mobile phone. During a voice call, the
signal is transmitted as in an ordinary voice call. The GSM
mobile at the receiving end is connected to another PC that
extracts the original leakage current data from the received
signal. The experimental arrangement has been shown in Fig.
1.
Fig. 1. Experimental Setup.
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 2013 IEEE 1st International Conference on Condition Assessment Techniques in Electrical Systems
C. Speech-like Symbol Design
A linear prediction based speech modeling technique,
employed by [15], is used for generation of speech-like
symbols. The length of each symbol is equal to 30 ms. The
speech-like symbol set designed consists of two poorly
correlated symbols only, one representing binary ‘1’ and one
representing binary ‘0’.
D. Synthesis of the Speech-Like Signal Sequence from
Leakage Current Data
The leakage current waveforms are characterized by their
low frequency harmonic content. In the developed scheme,
this harmonic information contained in the leakage current
waveshape, in the form of amplitude and phase of the
harmonics, is broken up into binary bit streams. The ‘1’ and
‘0’ of the binary sequence are represented by two poorly
correlated speech-like symbols of 30 ms duration each.
The problem with such a scheme is that, the synthesized
GSM phone is connected to the microphone input of a PC via
an ordinary audio cable. The PC decodes the speech-like
signal by reversing the scheme as mentioned in Section D to
extract the leakage current signal. The speech-like symbol
frames are extracted from the received signal and are
compared with the two speech-like symbols that constitute the
original signal, to decide which symbol was most likely to be
sent.
IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
A moderately aged insulator has been used to record the
leakage current pattern in the laboratory. Fig. 2(a), 2(b) and
2(c) shows three different 80 ms windows of the recorded
pattern for the insulator.
These three 80ms windows are marked as Window I,
Window II and Window III respectively.
1

signal for one power frequency cycle of leakage current dilates 0.8

to take a duration of few seconds. The degree of dilation 0.6

Normalized Leakage Current(A)

depends on the number of bits used and number of harmonic 0.4

components considered. However, leakage current waveshape, 0.2

being an indicator of the surface degradation in insulators, will 0

change very slowly, and takes substantial time before a -0.2

noticeable change can be observed. As such, the length of the -0.4

synthesized signal will not result in a loss of information -0.6

because the leakage current will hardly exhibit significant -0.8

changes over a period of few minutes. -1

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80
The signal synthesis is carried out using the following Time(ms)
(a)
steps: 1

• The magnitude and phase of harmonic components 0.8

upto nth order harmonic of each power frequency 0.6

cycle of leakage current signal is determined.

Normalized Leakage Current(A)

0.4

• The magnitude and phase information for each 0.2

harmonic component is converted into Na and Nθ-bit 0

binary numbers respectively. -0.2

• The complete information pertaining to a single -0.4

harmonic component is obtained as a bit stream of Na -0.6
bits representing the magnitude, followed by Nθ bits -0.8
representing the phase. Thus, total information of a -1
single harmonic component contains (Na + Nθ ) bits. 0 10 20 30 40
Time(ms)
50 60 70 80

• The bit stream is converted into a speech-like signal (b)

1
by a data to speech modulator. Each ‘1’ and ‘0’ of the
0.8
bit stream is represented by two separate poorly
correlated speech-like symbols of 30 ms duration.
0.6
Normalized Leakage Current(A)

Thus, the bit stream is converted into a signal 0.4

sequence with two speech-like symbol combinations. 0.2

• The method is repeated for all harmonic components 0

upto n harmonics. Hence, the total number of bits -0.2

required to encode the information contained within -0.4

one power frequency cycle of leakage current is -0.6

n*(Na + Nθ) bits and the length of the synthesized -0.8

signal sequence is (30*n*(Na + Nθ)) ms. -1

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80
Time(ms)

This method is followed for each power frequency cycle (c)

of leakage current that is to be transmitted. At the receiving
Fig. 2. Normalized current waveform of Leakage Current for the insulator at
end GSM terminal, the headphone output of the receiving the sending end for (a) window I, (b) window II and (c) window III.

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 2013 IEEE 1st International Conference on Condition Assessment Techniques in Electrical Systems
To test the developed scheme, the three windows of the 0.8
Original Signal
recorded leakage current signal of the insulator were sent over 0.7 Reconstructed Signal

the GSM voice channel. The waveforms obtained at the 0.6

remote terminal for windows I, II and III of leakage current
have been depicted in Figs. 3(a), 3(b) and 3(c) respectively. 0.5

Amplitude
The order of harmonics considered was upto the 10th order for 0.4

the particular case shown. Experiments were carried out 0.3

multiple times and not much deviation was found in any of the
cases which prove the effectiveness of the entire scheme. The
0.2

amplitude spectrum of leakage current waveform for the three 0.1

different sets of data, both original and reconstructed, has been 0

0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000
shown in Fig. 4(a), 4(b) and 4(c) respectively. Frequency(Hz)

(a)
1

0.8 0.7
Original Signal
0.6 Reconstructed Signal
Normalized Leakage Current(A)

0.6
0.4

0.2 0.5

0
0.4

Amplitude
-0.2
0.3
-0.4

-0.6
0.2
-0.8
0.1
-1
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80
Time(ms)
0
(a) 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000
Frequency(Hz)

1 (b)
0.8
0.7
0.6 Original Signal
Normalized Leakage Current(A)

Reconstructed Signal
0.4 0.6

0.2
0.5
0

0.4
Amplitude

-0.2

-0.4
0.3
-0.6

-0.8 0.2

-1
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 0.1
Time(ms)
(b) 0
0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000
Frequency(Hz)
1
(c)
0.8

0.6
Fig. 4. Amplitude spectrum of Leakage Current for (a) window I, (b) window
Normalized Leakage Current(A)

0.4 II and (c) window III.

0.2

0
The normalized root mean square errors (RMSE) for the three
-0.2
windows have been shown in Table I. it is observed that for all
-0.4
three sections of the leakage current, the normalized RMSE is
-0.6 around 3%.
-0.8

-1 TABLE I. NORMALIZED ROOT MEAN SQUARE ERROR OF LEAKAGE

0 10 20 30 40
Time(ms)
50 60 70 80
CURRENT WAVEFORM WINDOWS
(c) Leakage Current Normalized Root Mean Square
Waveform Error
Fig. 3. Normalized current waveform of Leakage Current obtained at the Window I 3.35%
remote terminal for (a) window I, (b) window II and (c) window III. Window II 3.36%
Window III 2.93%

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 2013 IEEE 1st International Conference on Condition Assessment Techniques in Electrical Systems
V. CONCLUSIONS [3]
This paper presents a developed scheme that may be
employed for remote monitoring of high voltage insulators
based on GSM network. The steps of the proposed scheme can
[4]
be summarized as follows: At first, the leakage current signal
of a moderately aged insulator was recorded in the laboratory.
Then, the harmonic information contained in the leakage
current signal, in the form of amplitude and phase, was [5]
extracted. The successive harmonics were represented as a
continuous bit-stream comprising of the amplitude and phase
information of each harmonic component. The bit-stream was
transformed into a speech-like signal sequence that could pass [6]
through the GSM network with minimum distortion. Finally,
the binary bit-stream was recovered at the remote terminal, and
the harmonic information was extracted by reversing the
[7]
scheme and the leakage current waveform was reconstructed.
The scheme was found to exhibit an acceptable RMSE of
around 3%.
The developed technique can be also applied for [8]
reconstruction of power frequency electrical signals, which are
characterized by differences in their harmonic content, with [9]
respect to their amplitude and phase. A major advantage of the
scheme is that, no specialized hardware is required at the
remote end to access the data. Also, unlike most other remote
monitoring techniques that involve dedicated communication
[10]
networks, this scheme utilizes the existing GSM network. This
saves on both cost and system development time. Besides, with
the widespread use of cellular technology, it is possible to
monitor the insulator condition from almost any remote
[11]
location throughout the globe. Thus, it may be concluded that
the present work opens up the possibility of developing low
cost remote condition monitoring technique applicable to high
voltage equipment. [12]
ACKNOWLEDGMENT [13]
This work has been supported by UPE Phase –II, Jadavpur
University.
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[14]
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