MohamadAli Amini - Yazd University
AliReza Sedighi Anaraki
MohamadTaghi Sadeghi

The aperiodic occurrence of widespread contamination related outages is a problem that distribution utilities are faced. These faults sometimes suddenly and seriouslydamage the system and reduce power quality and power system reliability. Usually insulator washing is a solution for this problem and itsevents. Since insulator washing has a high cost, it should be done by a primary and organized planning, although the contamination level is reduced naturally by heavy precipitationand fault probability is declined. One of the solutions of washing planning is studying of feederinsulators leakage current (ILC). This paper presents a new method for studying the insulators contamination(IC) level using Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Principal ComponentAnalysis (PCA). The proposed method has been examined in a 45 days period and an index for contamination level has beenextracted. Finally the algorithm of proposed method has been presented. Experimental results demonstrate that the highfrequency components can be used effectively to study the contamination conditions of outdoor insulators.

Insulators Leakage Current; Discrete Wavelet Transform; Principal Componenet Analysis