Author(s)

M. Vanitha¹, N. Narmadhai², M. Karthik¹

¹Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Coimbatore Institute of Engineering and Technology, Coimbatore, India.
²Department of Electrical Engineering, Government College of Technology, Coimbatore, India.

Fluid insulating medium is used for electrical insulation and provides a cooling medium in high voltage power transformers. Due to this reason, petroleum based mineral oil (transformer oil) is mostly used for a number of years which holds the benefit of cost effectiveness and good flow rate. This benefit leads to more requirements of oil that may cause oil scarcity in the near future. In order to overcome the scarcity in forthcoming years many research works focus on identifying the best approach for regeneration of oils. In this paper, activated carbon obtained from the agricultural waste is used which acts as the absorbent of impurities. Use of activated carbon is a perfect approach for regeneration of oils. Critical characteristics such as breakdown voltage, flash point, fire point and viscosity are measured for the pure and aged mineral oil with and without adding activated carbon. By this approach it is found that the activated carbon with used oil 1, used oil 2 and fresh oil provides continuous improvement of properties as per IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) and ASTM (American Society for Testing and Materials) standards which will reduce the oil consumption and cost. From the analysis, it reveals that mineral oil with activated carbon has better properties and the use of activated carbon is the best practice of regeneration of oils.

Activated Carbon, Mineral Oil, Power Transformer, Breakdown Voltage, Viscosity

Vanitha, M. , Narmadhai, N. and Karthik, M. (2016) Investigation of Critical Characteristics of Mineral Oil with Activated Carbon. Circuits and Systems, 7, 2521-2529. doi: 10.4236/cs.2016.79218.