1

Breakdown Prediction of Oil Insulation Using

SVM
Adnan Iqbal, and Supriyo Das, Member, IEEE
Abstract— Investigate the modeling and analysis of the electric
field distribution in oil gaps, stressed by the breakdown voltages,
under varying electrode gap and rate of voltage rise (ramp rate),
with finite element method. Breakdown voltage of the oil gap is of
vital importance for the design of the transformer insulation in
high voltage. In this paper, a prediction method for the
breakdown voltage of a typical oil gap, based on the dynamic
electric field features and support vector machine (SVM) is
discussed. According to the finite element calculation results of
dynamic electric field distribution, the electric field values in the
whole region, discharge channel and surface of the electrode were
extracted and post-processed, which consisted of the electric field
features which characterized the gap structure. Then, the
breakdown voltage prediction model of the oil gap was
established by using electric field features as the input
parameters to SVM, and whether the oil gap breakdown would
happen as the output parameters of SVM. This model was
applied to predict the dielectric strength of oil gaps of parallel
plate electrodes with varying electrode gap and varying ramp
rate.
constructed using support vector machine (SVM). The set of
electric field features are dimensionally reduced by principal
component analysis (PCA) to extract meaningful information
from the features of electric field.
Owing to both structural and technological differences,
breakdown voltage of apparently identical insulation
specimens varies from one to another in a random way [5].
This paper investigates the modeling and analysis of the
dynamic electric field distribution in oil gaps, stressed by the
breakdown voltages, under flat plate electrode with finite
element method.
II. METHODOLOGY
The methodology has been divided into two sections namely,
experiential methodology and prediction methodology.
A. Experimental Methodology

Keywords—Support Vector Machine, SVM, Principal The breakdown of soybean oil was tested in a standard
Component Analysis, PCA, breakdown voltage, electric field dielectric oil tester (BAUR DPA 75 C). Two standard-
distribution, dielectric insulation. compliant parallel plate circular test electrodes shape under
the standard ASTM D 877 is selected. The parallel plate
I. INTRODUCTION circular electrode shape was selected to study the breakdown
The role of electrical insulation is crucial for the protection phenomenon under uniform electric field. A ramp voltage is
of electrical equipment such as transformers, bushing cable applied to one of the electrode while keeping the other
and capacitors. Liquid dielectrics is a self-restoring insulator, electrode grounded until the breakdown occurs. Two
thus has proven to give long term protection in power experiments are performed, firstly by varying the electrode
equipment’s [1]. Based on data obtained from research gap at constant ramp rate. Secondly, by varying the ramp rate
laboratory and field trials, a practical, vegetable-oil-based at constant electrode gap. After filling the test cell with the oil
dielectric insulation can be incorporated into transformer insulation, a hold time of 3 minutes is given with continuous
insulation systems [2]. Breakdown in liquid dielectrics is stirring before applying voltage. Between consecutive
governed by streamer formation, breakdown occurs when breakdowns there is a pause time of 5 minutes with continuous
stirring. The mentioned parameters were maintained constant
streamer bridges the gap from high voltage electrode to
throughout the breakdown test experiment. Ten measurements
grounded electrode [3]. The structure of streamer depends on
were taken for both the experiments.
chemical properties, purity and composition of the oil
insulation; applied voltage and the electrode arrangement.
Streamers are formed at the site of high electric field stress
[4].
The study of the field strength distribution under different
electrode geometry is of vital importance due to the different
distribution of electric field thus governing the breakdown
mechanism. In this paper parallel plate electrode is employed,
the electric field distribution is uniform electric field. One of
the most determinant factors of the dielectric strength of the
insulating materials is the field strength distribution, when
stressed by high voltages. The prediction model has been
 2

Fig. 1: Schematic diagram of the spatial location (plane-plane oil gap). the following five groups:
B. Prediction Methodology 1) Electric field strength, L2MT-3I-1.
2) Electric field energy, L2MT-2.
The prediction method is based on the dynamic electric 3) Energy density, L-1MT-2.
field features and SVM. The experimental data is divided into 4) Superficial area, L2.
training and test sample. In case of varying electrode gap, the 5) Scale parameters, dimensionless.
electric field features corresponding to electrode gap of 3.5
The electric field features [6] are calculated for time every
mm and 5.5 mm were selected as the training data whereas
step interval of 0.1 second for the respective ramp rate time
features for 2.5 mm, 4.5 mm and 6.5 mm were selected as the
dependent boundary condition for varying electrode gap.
test data. Similarly, in case of varying ramp rate (RR) the
Table I shows the list of electric field features.
electric field features corresponding to ramp rate of 1 kV/s and
7 kV/s were selected as the training data whereas features for TABLE I. SET OF ELECTRIC FIELD FEATURES.
3 kV/sec, 5 kV/s and 9 kV/ mm were selected as the test data. Spatial
The training data is used to develop the prediction model Electric Field Features No.
Location
for the SVM, whereas the test data is used to evaluate the Emw; Eaw; Edw; Ww; Wew; Vr90w; Vr75w; Vr50w; Vr25w;
generalizability of the prediction model. Fig. 2 shows the Whole area 13
Wr90w; Wr75w; Wr50w; Wr25w
flowchart of prediction model. Breakdown voltage U b of the Discharge Emd;Ead;Edd;Wd;Wed;Vr90d;Vr75d;Vr50d;Wr90d; Wr75d;
oil gap is selected for a particular electrode gap and ramp rate 11
channel Wr50d
from the training Data set. Electrode
Ub¿ Ems; S90; S75; S50; S25; Sr90; Sr75; Sr50; Sr25 9
U −¿=0.9
b
(1) surface
U ¿
U +¿=1.1
b
b
(2)
The electric field features corresponding to voltage in the
range, ¿ to U b ¿ is unable to cause breakdown is labelled as
+¿ ¿
-1, whereas the voltage range from ¿ to U b is able to cause
breakdown is labelled as +1. Hence, the problem is
transformed to a binary class classification problem. The
electrode geometry is constructed in COMSOL Multiphysics
and time dependent boundary conditions are applied to the
+¿¿
high voltage electrode. The simulation was run till time t o in
equation (3)
+ ¿/RR ¿

t +¿=U ¿
b
b
(3)
COMSOL determines for the electric field distribution of
the oil gap by finite element method (FEM) and the
corresponding electric field features are extracted at every step
time of 0.1 second. The training samples are formed by post
processing the electric field features by normalization and
dimension reduction, and the tuning parameters of the SVM
model C and gamma is found by trial and error. To test the
generalizability of the SVM the test electric field features
corresponding to gap distance and voltage rise are given as an Fig. 2: Flowchart of prediction model.
input to the SVM model, and the output SVM labels are
compared with the original test labels and error analysis is
made. Calculation of Breakdown voltage could be achieved by
applying an initial voltage U o , if the SVM prediction model
outputs -1, then applied voltage is set as U =U o +dU , where
dU =( RR ×0.1) . The SVM will have different prediction
model for varying electrode gap and varying ramp rate
respectively. The flowchart of the prediction model is given in
Fig. 1.
a) Set of Electric Field Features
Fig. 3: Electric field distribution (V/m) at 1 volt at the edge of electrode.
The set of electric field features can also be defined by
physical quantities and dimensions. They can be divided into Apart from electric field features calculated at every time
 3

step for varying electrode gap, the cumulative sum of features and the sample data is limited. The statistical learning in build
(CSF) was calculated for varying ramp, for a particular commands in MATLAB is used in this report to solve the
applied voltage (AV) from t=0.1 to (AV/RR) the final feature classification problem. The objective function of the
becomes as shown in equation (4).
N
optimization problem is given by equation (8).
CSF( N )= ∑ Feature( N ) (4)
N
1

}
t=0.1 2
AV optimize : min
⏟ 2 ‖ẃ‖ +C ∑ ξi a
N= ẃ , b ,ξ
i=1 b ¿ where : ¿ ξ i ≥ 0 ¿ c ¿
RR
(5) ¿ : ¿
a) Features Dimension Reduction Method (8)
One of the challenges of dealing with features is that the Where ẃ is called the weight vector, b is called the bias, y i is
units of different co-ordinates may vary widely, all the the class label corresponding to feature vector xi, ξi are slack
features may not be of similar units which may bias the variables that consents margin failure and C is a parameter
learning process of SVM, and thus a common method to deal which negotiates margin width with a small number of margin
with such problem is to normalize the data [7]. Equation (6) is failures. When the optimization problem is transformed into
used for normalization. the dual form, it simply changes the constraint optimization
into a box constraint given by equation (9).
x i−x min
x 'i= +1 min Ψ ( α ) = 1
N N N

}
xmax −x min
α
∑ ∑ y y ( x́ . x́ )α α −∑ α
2 i=1 j=1 i j i j i j i=1 i
(6)
xi is the normalized value of a certain feature xi, xmin and xmax 0 ≤ α i ≤C , ∀ i , (9)
are the minimum and maximum values of xi. Hence, the N
feature has been normalized from the interval [xmin, xmax] to [1, ∑ α i y i=0
2]. Let this matrix be called C. i=1
Feature dimension reduction is usually a pre-processing step Where α i is the lagrangian multiplier which is introduced
in machine learning; it is to reconstruct the high dimensional
when equation (8) is transformed into its dual form. The
space to a low dimensional space while retaining most of the
information in the original data set. This is usually done to variable ξ i do not appear in the dual form at all. Moreover the
overcome the “curse of dimensionality” faced in large value of ẃ is not needed explicitly in the dual form. The
dimension spaces. The term was first introduced by Bellman decision rule is given by equation (10), where x́ is the vector
(1961) to combat optimization over many dimensions, where whose class label is decided by the sign of it, +1 means a
the computational effort was observe to grow exponentially as positive class label and -1 means a negative class label.
dimensions increase. In statistics, the phrase represents the i=N
scarcity of data in multiple dimensions [8], thus we would s=sgn( ∑ α i y i ( x́ . x́ i)−b) (10)
require large samples if we were to not use dimension i=1
reduction. SVMs can be further generalized to non-linear classifiers
Principal component analysis (PCA) is used for feature [2]. The above equation (9) and (10) are valid for linear
dimension reduction. The goal is to avoid losing prematurely separable case, however most of the real world problem are
possible nonlinear information in the data, with the choice of non-linear in nature. Therefore a kernel function is introduced
reduced dimension (k) is 1 ≤ k ≤ 10 is expected in practice. which will map the non-separable classes from the original
k space into a feature space where they will be linearly. The
∑ λi dual form equation (9) and the decision rule (10) are modified
P= i=1 (7) as shown in equation (11) and (12).
d
N N N
∑ λi min Ψ ( α ) = 1

}
i=1 α
∑ ∑ y y K ( x́i x́ j )α i α j−∑ α i
2 i=1 j =1 i j i=1
The first few principal components whose cumulative Eigen
values are above the required threshold are chosen as given by
0 ≤ αi≤ C , ∀ i ,
N
equation (7). Where λ i is the ith Eigen value corresponding to
principle components arranged in descending order. ∑ αi y i=0
i=1
b) SVM Theory
(11)
There is a multidimensional non-linear relationship between
the features of electric field, the oil gap breakdown voltage
 4

i=N breakdown process.

s=sgn( ∑ α i y i K ( x́ . x́i )−b) (12)
i=1
The limited computational power of linear learning machines
was highlighted in the 1960s by Minsky and Papert. In
general, complex real-world applications require more
expensive hypothesis spaces than linear functions [7]. Kernel
representations offer an alternative solution by projecting the
data into a higher dimension space where it is linearly
separable. The use of linear machine in the dual representation
makes it possible to perform this step implicitly. Thus kernel
function applies a non-linear mapping of the data into a
feature space, where it can be separated linearly.
2 slope of the Weibull plot.
K ( x i , x j ) =exp ⁡( −γ ‖ xi −x j‖ ) (13)
Radial basis function (RBF) given in equation (13), is selected
as the kernel function, where γ is a positive constant, xi is the
training observation and xj be the test observation. If the test
observation is far from the training observation, then the
square of its distance will be large, so K(xi,xj) will be small,
then that respective training observation will have no role in
determining the class of the test observation. In other words,
training observation that are far from the test observation will
essentially play no role in predicting class labels from the test
observation; this means that the radial basis kernel has a very
local behavior in the sense that only.
c) Error Analysis
Integral part in predicting breakdown voltage is error
analysis. By conducting error analysis, the quality of the
prediction model can be assessed precisely so as to find the
suitable application of the model. Sum of square error and
mean absolute percentage error are applied in this paper to
examine the error of the prediction results.
1) Sum of square error.
N
e SSE =∑ ( Ai−P i)2 (14)
i =1
B. Breakdown Analysis using Weibull Distribution
Breakdown mechanism of oil insulation is intrinsic in
nature. Due to the stochastic nature of breakdown of oil
insulation, Weibull distribution is used to fit the statistical
distribution of breakdown voltage for the oil insulation.
Weibull distribution is an asymmetrical distribution and has
been more frequently used for analyzing breakdown of
dielectrics [10]. The Weibull plot can be described by two
parameter namely scale parameter and shape parameter. Scale
parameter, is the value at which the probability of occurrence
of breakdown is 63.21 %, whereas shape parameter is the
The breakdown voltage or the breakdown gradient (break-
down field strength) can thus be considered a random variable.
The probability distribution normally used is the two-
parameter Weibull distribution, which is written in the general
as shown in equation (16).
F ( x )=1−exp ⁡¿ (16)
Where x is a random variable; α is called the scale
parameter, α is the value of x for which a probability of
breakdown is 63.2 %; β is the shape parameter, related to the
scatter of the data. According to equation (16)
ln [ln (1/{1−F ( x)}) vs ln ( x )] is plotted and a line of first
degree which best fits the Weibull CDF plot. The Weibull plot
is constructed for both experiments and the value of α and β is
extracted from the plot.
Fig. 4 and 5 shows the Weibull CDF plots whereas table II
and III shows the Weibull parameters for varying electrode
gap and varying ramp rate respectively. The Weibull scale
parameter and shape parameters can be extracted from
Weibull CDF plots.

TABLE II. BREAKDOWN VOLTAGE FOR VARYING

2) Mean absolute percentage error. ELECTRODE GAP AT 5 KV/SEC.
N
1 A i−Pi Electrode Gap Scale Shape
e MAPE = ∑
N i=1 | |
Ai
(mm)
2.5
Parameter α (kV)
30.0751
Parameter β
5.5813
(15) 3.5 39.1742 5.2175
4.5 48.1195 5.2388
III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
A. Experimental Results 5.5 53.1825 4.1453
6.5 54.2403 8.8027
The breakdown voltage for varying electrode gap was
measured at 2.5mm, 3.5 mm, 4.5 mm, 5.5 mm and 6.5 mm. TABLE III. BREAKDOWN VOLTAGE FOR VARYING
For varying ramp rate breakdown data was measured at 1 RAMP RATE AT 5 KV/SEC.
Ramp Rate Scale Shape
kV/s, 3 kV/s, 5 kV/s, 7 kV/s and 9 kV/s. The experiment was (kV/s) Parameter α (kV) Parameter β
performed at a hold time of three minutes and a pause time of 1.0 35.1558 4.4384
5 minutes was given before consecutive breakdown, ten
3.0 41.1807 10.1795
measurements were taken for the specified conditions. Due to
the stochastic behavior of breakdown mechanism, Weibull 5.0 43.0897 15.4425
distribution is used to provide the scale parameter for the
 5

7.0 46.6006 10.8403

9.0 47.6363 15.8739

Fig. 6: SVM plot for varying electrode gap at 5 kV/sec.

Fig. 4: Weibull plot for varying electrode gap at 5 kV/sec.
Similarly in fig. 7, the clustering of electric field features
for varying ramp rate is shown. Each point on the graph
corresponds to the voltage with respect to its reduced electric
field features by PCA. Thus when the point crosses the SVM
plane, a breakdown is recorded.

Fig. 5: Weibull plot for varying ramp rate at 4 mm.

Fig. 7: SVM plot for varying ramp rate at 4 mm.
C. SVM Prediction Fig. 8 and 9 shows the comparison of experimental
breakdown values and predicted breakdown values. Table IV
The SVM prediction model was trained with features of 3.5 and table V shows the comparison of experimental and
mm and 5.5 mm and tested for 2.5 mm, 4.5 mm and 6.5 mm predicted results along with error analysis and SVM tuning
for varying electrode gap. Similarly model was trained with parameters.
features of 1 kV/sec and 7 kV/sec and tested for 3 kV/sec, 5
kV/sec and 9 kV/sec for varying ramp rate , and the output
labels of the test data were compared to the original test data,
the tuning parameters of SVM were found by trial and error.
Fig. 6 and 7 shows the SVM plots trained by the 1 st and 2nd
principal component.
In fig. 6, the clustering of electric field features for varying
electrode gap is shown. Each point on the graph corresponds
to the voltage with respect to its reduced electric field features
by PCA. Thus when the point crosses the SVM plane, a
breakdown is recorded.
 6

Fig. 8: Comparison of experimental and predicted value for varying Transactions on Dielectrics and Electrical Insulation, vol. 12, no. 1, pp.
electrode gap. 11-16, Feb. 2005.
[6] Z. Qiu, J. Ruan, D. Huang, Z. Pu and S. Shu, "A prediction method for
breakdown voltage of typical air gaps based on electric field features and
support vector machine," in IEEE Transactions on Dielectrics and
Electrical Insulation, vol. 22, no. 4, pp. 2125-2135, August 2015.
[7] A. Smola and S.V.N. Vishwanathan, “Introduction,” in Introduction to
Machine Learning, 1st ed., United Kingdom: Cambridge University
Press, 2008 ch. 1, pp. 7.
[8] G. Jamesm D. Witten, T. Hastie and R. Tibshirani, “Support Vector
Machines,” in An Introduction to Statistical Learning, 2nd ed., New
York: Springer, 2009, pp. 347-353.
[9] V. N. Vapnik, “Methods of pattern recognition,” in The nature of
statistical learning theory, 2nd ed., New York: Springer-Verlag, 1995,
pp. 138–146.
[10] H. Gupta and S. Das, "Statistical analysis of oil insulation breakdown
voltage," 2017 IEEE International Conference on Industrial
Engineering and Engineering Management (IEEM), Singapore, 2017,
Fig. 9: Comparison of experimental and predicted value for varying pp. 2044-2048.
electrode gap.

TABLE IV. PREDICTED BREAKDOWN VOLTAGE FOR

VARYING ELECTRODE GAP AT 5 KV/SEC.
Gap Exp. SVM
Gamma C MAPE % SSE
(mm) (kV) (kV)
2.5 30.0 30.5
4.5 48.0 46.5 1 10 2.021 18.5
6.5 54.5 58.5

TABLE V. PREDICTED BREAKDOWN VOLTAGE FOR

RAMP RATE AT 4 MM.
Ramp Rate Exp. SVM
γ C MAPE % SSE
(kV/s) (kV) (kV)
3.0 41.7 41.1
5.0 43.0 44.0 1.5 50 0.0627 1.36
9.0 47.7 47.7

IV. CONCLUSION
SVM successfully predicted breakdown voltages for
varying electrode gap and varying ramp rate based on the
electric field features of the oil insulation. The error result
shows that the predicted breakdown voltage is in good
agreement with experimental breakdown voltage. Thus we can
conclude that the features of electric field have significant
information in determining the breakdown voltage of oil
insulation for both the experiments.

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