Patent ID: 8571830

Claim:
A method for predicting flashover of an electrical generator collector, the method comprising: buffering measured data corresponding to a plurality of measured variables measured at multiple discrete time instances over a determined time period to generate a frame of measured data using a generator monitoring unit, an exciter and control unit, or both the generator monitoring unit and the exciter and control unit; receiving the frame of measured data using a receiver module; fitting a statistical model to the frame of measured data by dividing the frame of measured data into a plurality of time windows and determining one or more coefficients of the statistical model using the measured data for each of the plurality of time windows using a statistics module; estimating one or more parameters for the frame based upon the measured data and the statistical model, wherein the one or more parameters comprise at least one of field circuit impedance and field current noise using an estimation module; and predicting a flashover condition of the electrical generator collector based, at least in part, upon the one or more estimated parameters for the frame using a flashover prediction module.