An Online Measurement Method for Insulator Creepage Distance on Transmission Lines

Insulators play a crucial role in ensuring the normal operation of the power system, and the creepage distance is an important electrical parameter of insulators. Most available solutions focus mainly on offline measurement methods, and online measurement for insulator creepage distance on transmission lines remains a challenging task. To address this issue and to further improve the corresponding work efficiency, an online measurement method for insulator creepage distance is presented in this paper. Considering the glass material of the insulator and the long measuring distance, this method recognizes the insulator type indirectly by calculating the structural parameters of the insulators based on their geometric features, and then obtaining the creepage distance. Accordingly, a measurement system, which mainly includes an electronic total station and a camera with a telephoto lens, is designed in this paper. Moreover, this paper also proposes an error analysis model aimed at reducing the errors caused by the layout of this system. In the conducted experiments, this proposed method effectively obtains the creepage distance and the error correction model can further improve the measurement accuracy of structural parameters.