Extensive efforts have been made for many years by the power generating industry to replace conventional solid and liquid insulation with synthetic materials. Those measures are aimed at increasing the load capacity, improved fire safety and extending transformer life during exploitation. Modern insulating materials include aramid fibre-based paper and insulating fluids made of synthetic and natural esters. The paper presents research results of the electrostatic charging tendency (ECT) of mixtures of fresh and aged mineral oil Trafo En with synthetic ester Midel 7131 and natural ester Midel 1204. The measurements were taken in a flow-through system using the pipes made of metal, cellulose and aramid paper. The influence of the liquid flow velocity, the type of material of the measuring pipe and the mixture content on the level of the streaming electrification current generation was determined.

Transformers are one of the most important components of the power system. It is important to maintain and assess the condition. Transformer lifetime depends on the life of its insulation and insulation life is also strongly influenced by moisture in the insulation. Due to importance of this issue, in this paper a new method is introduced for determining the moisture content of the transformer insulation system using dielectric response analysis in the frequency domain based on artificial bee colony algorithm. First, the master curve of dielectric response is modeled. Then, using proposed method the master curve and the measured dielectric response curves are compared. By analyzing the results of the comparison, the moisture content of paper insulation, electrical conductivity of the insulating oil and dielectric model dimensions are determined. Finally, the proposed method is applied to several practical samples to demonstrate its capabilities compared with the well-known conventional method.