Abstract
Conventional methods for the online monitoring of icing conditions of composite insulators suffer from difficulties. To solve this issue, a novel method is first proposed to detect glaze icing load via embedding three optical fibers with fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) into a 10 kV composite insulator. Specifically, FBG temperature compensation sensors were packaged in ceramic tubes to solve strain and temperature cross-sensitivity. Temperature effect experiments and simulated glaze icing load experiments were performed to verify the feasibility of the proposed method. The results show that temperature sensitivities of all FBGs are identical (i.e., 10.68 pm/°C), which achieves a simultaneous measurement of temperature and strain. In addition, the proposed method can detect glaze icing load of the composite insulator above 0.5 N (i.e., 15% of icicle bridged degree) in the laboratory.