Monitoring of Moisture in Transformer Oil Using Optical Fiber as Sensor

This paper describes an optical fiber sensor and temperature sensor-based instrumentation system to measure the moisture content in transformer oil. The sensor system consists of (i) Diode Laser Source, (ii) a bare and bent multimode fiber as sensor probe, (iii) an LDR as detector, (iv) LM35-based temperature sensor, and (v) microcontroller system having a trained ANN for processing and calibration. The bare and bent optical fiber sensor and the temperature sensor LM35 are used to provide the measures of refractive index (RI) and temperature of a transformer oil sample. An ATmega32-microcontroller-based system with trained ANN algorithm has been developed to determine the moisture content of the transformer oil sample by sampling the readings of the bare bent optical fiber sensor and the temperature sensor.