I am glad to write this report on the successful completion of my project as proposed in the DEIS Graduate Student Fellowship. I extend my sincere thanks to the DIES Education Committee for granting me the DEIS Graduate Student Fellowship. I am also thankful to my PhD supervisor Prof. Sisir Kumar Nayak for his support and mentoring during the implementation of this project. This fellowship strengthened morale and boosted confidence during my PhD. I got an opportunity to collaborate with Prof. Manu A. Haddad from the Advanced High Voltage Engineering Research Centre, Cardiff University, on this project whose input helped me improve the way I presented this work. It also helped me network with renowned academicians when I presented my work at ICD 2024, Toulouse, France. I strongly believe that this fellowship helped me grow to new heights in my career.
Dr Rohith Sangineni presenting his work at ICD 2024
I would like to summarize the work I carried out as part of the fellowship. I earlier worked on using an S-band horn antenna to measure the reflection coefficient (S11) from the transformer oil that is used to predict the moisture and acid number in the oils. This testing was performed in a large anechoic chamber (6 × 4 × 6 m) and was able to achieve good accuracy in predicting moisture and acid number [1]. However, the huge anechoic chamber hinders the scope of making this technique portable. Therefore, as a part of this GSF, the test setup is scaled down to a portable size (1 × 1 × 1 m), as shown in the figure below. The scaled setup is enclosed with Aluminium sheets and then grounded to avoid EMI. The experiments performed on the mineral oil in [1] are repeated in the scaled anechoic chamber and the test setup is calibrated. Further, the technique is extended to test the alternative insulating oils (a few nanofluids, natural ester oil, and blended oils) and found to be suitable for testing ester and blended oils too.
(i) Stationed anechoic chamber, (ii) portable anechoic chamber with test setup.
I presented this work at ICD 2024 organized at the Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse, France. I can be seen in Figure 2 at the poster in ICD 2024. I had an honor to present the work in person to our DEIS Education committee chair Prof. Christian Franck who took special interest in visiting the poster board. I encourage a greater number of eligible students to come forward and apply for this fellowship. I take an opportunity to thank everyone who has been a part of my journey.
[1] R. Sangineni, S. K. Nayak and M. Becerra, “A Non-Intrusive and Non-Destructive Technique for Condition Assessment of Transformer Liquid Insulation,” IEEE Trans. Dielectr. Electr. Insul., vol. 29, no. 2, pp. 693-700, April 2022.
