Insulation Life Assessment Method for Substation Equipment Based on Three-Dimensional Temperature Measurement Modeling

As the load demand of power systems continues to grow, substation equipment is subjected to increasingly harsh operating conditions, leading to more prominent insulation aging issues. Traditional insulation life assessment methods rely heavily on manual inspections or single-point temperature monitoring, which suffer from limited observational dimensions and a lack of spatial distribution information. These limitations hinder their ability to meet the refined sensing requirements of modern equipment condition monitoring. To address these challenges, this paper proposes an insulation life assessment method for substation equipment based on three-dimensional thermal modeling. By constructing a 3D spatial model of the equipment and integrating infrared thermographic data, accurate mapping of temperature information onto the spatial point cloud is achieved. This enables the identification of hotspot regions and the estimation of their remaining insulation life using thermal aging models. A case study involving typical equipment in a 110 kV substation was conducted, in which a thermal field distribution model was built and insulation life simulation was performed. The results demonstrate that the proposed method can accurately locate high-temperature areas and predict insulation degradation trends, thereby providing effective support for the operation and maintenance of substation equipment.