A Two-Stage Overload Strategy of Oil-immersed
Transformers Considering Operation Risk
Yu Zhang, Yu Cao, Di He, Chuangxin Guo
College of Electrical Engineering
Zhejiang University
Hangzhou, China
zhangyu_ee@zju.edu.cn
Abstract—Recently, the incentive to improve transformer
utilization driven by increasing power demands and financial
pressure of new equipment investment is more and more strong.
Existing study focus on overloading constraints like hottest-spot
temperature (HST) and failure rate, but the transformer
operation risk is rarely considered in overload strategy making.
This paper firstly proposes an operation risk analytical method
of oil-immersed transformers, to evaluate the transformer loss,
power grid enterprise loss and society loss during overloading.
Considering the operation risk, a two-stage overload strategy is
presented. In stage 1, the security constraints including HST,
failure rate and the proposed risk are discussed to obtain a
preliminary strategy; in stage 2, benefits and costs of overloading
are calculated to analyze the economy of strategies between
preliminary strategy and full-loading, and the profit-optimal
strategy will be chosen as the final strategy. The validity of
proposed overload strategy and influence of transformer service
time on strategy making is demonstrated through case study.
Index Terms—Transformer, operation risk, overload strategy,
economy.
I. INTRODUCTION
In recent years, driven by the increasing power demand and
reluctance to invest new equipment, it is of great significance
to formulate an overload strategy for transformers to ensure
that the transformers can be fully, but safely utilized [1].
Besides, the improvement of transformers utilization can bring
many benefits, such as environment protection, resource
conservation and cost reduction for power grid enterprises.
Early study on overload strategy of transformer is focused
on calculation of transformer hottest-spot temperature (HST),
which is generally considered to limit the load capacity of
transformer and influence the insulation aging speed. HST is
the worst (highest) temperature that the insulation of
transformer winding suffer. Common HST calculation models
include heat conduction model (IEEE model [2] and IEC
model [3]) and thermal circuit model [4]. The former model is
widely used in real-time calculation of HST [5-6], the latter
model can be improved by considering various practical factors
This work is supported by the National high technology research and
development program (863 Program) (2015AA050204), State grid technology
project (520626150032).
978-1-5386-2212-4/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE
Xiuming Du, Demeng Bai
Electric Power Research Institute
State Grid Shandong Electric Power Company
Jinan, China
554207565@qq.com
like oil viscosity [7] and environment factors [8].
Previous studies have considered several influencing and
limiting factors of overload strategy making. Arrhenius-
Weibull model is proposed to calculate real-time failure rate
and failure probability of transformers by J. He [9]. D. Feng
utilizes the insulating paper samples of scrapped transformers
and the degree of polymerization (DP) to correct the heat
conduction model [10]. Overload strategy of both transmission
and transformation equipment is studied by Y. Huang,
considering HST limit and failure rate limit, respectively [11].
An economic life assessment of transformer is proposed by J.
Wang [12], which can be utilized in overload strategy making.
Transformer operation risk has attracted lots of attention [13-
16]. Loss of life and dielectric failure risk is proposed by W. Fu
[13]. Data of loss life is used to assess the aging risk of
transformer [14]. By using dissolved gas analysis (DGA) as an
indicator, a transformer risk assessment method is developed
for power system in Latvia [15]. The effects of meteorological
risk and equipment health risk on transmission section are
analyzed by H. Qian [16]. However, these risk researches do
not take the impact of risk on transformer overload strategy
into consideration.
The main contributions of this paper are summarized below:
 Proposing a transformer operation risk index that integrates
transformer loss, power grid enterprise loss and society loss,
covering most possible impacts of overloading.
 A two-stage strategy is designed to ensure both security and
economy of transformer overloading: taking HST limit,
failure rate limit and risk limit into consideration to ensure
the security of overload strategy; optimizing the strategy to
obtain more profit for power grid enterprise.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: section II
establishes transformer operation risk model. A two-stage
overload strategy is then discussed in section III. The
calculation results from an ONAF transformer are shown in
section IV. Finally, the conclusion is drawn in section V.
II. OPERATION RISK OF OIL-IMMERSED TRANSFORMER
During overloading, the HST of transformer will increase
rapidly and be much worse than normal condition which results
in several negative impacts on transformer, power grid
enterprise and society. Due to the uncertainty of ambient
temperature and load, the uncertain HST variation is hard to be
quantified by using traditional deterministic method. Therefore,  B B  (6)
FAA( H )  exp   
risk conception [17] is introduced to reflect both probability 
 0  273  H  273 
and severity of those negative impacts.
te   ti FAA  H  ti   (7)
A. Probabilistic distribution of HST i

Since load rate and ambient temperature is uncertain [13],
probabilistic models to describe these variables and HST
should be established [18].
1) Distribution of working condition
The load rate and ambient temperature in the future can be
acquired from load and weather forecasting. There are always
errors in forecasting results. In this paper, it is assumed that
both uncertainties can be described by a normal distribution,
and the forecasting values are expected as mean values of the
distribution.
2) Relevance between the load and ambient temperature
Load rate is usually relevant to environment factors. For
instance, the peak loads in summer usually occur on the hottest
hours.
According to the above characteristic, it is assumed that the
distribution of load and ambient temperature is multivariate
normal, which can be obtained by two steps:
Step-1: For moment i, one sampling can be obtained with
 a (i )   X   fa (i ) 
K   A     (1)
 (i )   Y   K f (i ) 
where θa(i) and K(i) represent the sampling value of ambient
temperature and load rate at moment i, θfa(i) and Kf(i) represent
the forecasting value of ambient temperature and load at
moment i, X and Y are independent random variables of normal
distribution [18], A is a matrix generated by
AAT  COV ( fa , K f ) (2)
where COV(θfa, Kf) is the covariance matrix of forecasting
te  t FAA  H  te   (8)
where β is the shape parameter, B and C are empirical
constants, θ0 is the reference HST, factor of aging acceleration
FAA under θ0 describes the influence of HST on aging speed, ti
is an operation period where the HST is θH(ti), ∆te is the ILL
over short operation time ∆t.
In this paper, three impacts of overloading are considered:
loss of transformer, power grid enterprise and society.
1) Transformer loss
Transformer loss consists of ILL and dielectric loss. If a
transformer is operated at overloading state, on the one hand,
the HST is worse than θ0 and FAA will exceed the normal
value. On the other hand, the failure probability of dielectric
will increase, and dielectric failure leads to maintenance or
transformer replacing. The ILL and dielectric loss are
respectively denoted by SILL and SDL, expressed as
FAA( H )t (9)
S ILL   PT
NIL
t
S DL   e PT  0    1 (10)
NIL
where PT is the price of transformer, NIL is the normal
insulation life of transformer, and α is the maintenance factor.
2) Power grid enterprise and society loss
Once transformer fails at moment i, the power grid
enterprise and consumers will suffer sales revenue loss and
economical loss over power restoration time TR. These two
losses are denoted by SPGEL and SSL, expressed as
N R i

values of ambient temperature θfa and load rate Kf. S PGEL  K j i

( j) CR cos  ( PE  POG )t (11)
Step-2: For each moment, Monte Carlo method is utilized to N R i
obtain a distribution approximate to the multivariate normal SSL  CSL (TR )  K ( j )CR cos t (12)
j i
distribution. Then IEEE model is applied to calculate the HST
over each moment for each sample scenario. A simple where CR is the rated capacity of transformer, φ is the power
approach to get the HST probability density function over factor angle, PE and POG are the electricity price and on-grid
moment i is price respectively, CSL is the consumers economical loss during
n  H  the outage, NR represents the number of ∆t during the outage.
f  H   (3) 3) Composite risk index and risk limit
Ni
The composite risk RISK is the superposition of four types of
where θH represents the HST, n(θH) represents the number of risk, expressed as
possible HST falling in the temperature interval (θH-h, θH+h)
 NO
 Hmax
for a given h, Ni is the total number of possible HST. RISK    min Pr( H ) S  H  d
(i )
 H (i )
 i 1 (13)
B. Transformers Operation Risk  S    S  Pr(t |  )  S  S
 H ILL e H DL PGEL  S SL 
According to the Arrhenius-Weibull model [9], the failure
where NO is number of ∆t during overloading, S(θH) is the
rate λ and failure probability Pr of a transformer, whose
composite severity,  H (i ) and  H (i ) are the possible maximum
max min
insulation life loss (ILL) over time Σti is te, can be expressed as
 1 and minimum values of HST at the moment i. The risk limit
  te 
  te |  H   B /( H  273)  B /( H  273) 
(4) LR is defined as the possible profit from overloading,
Ce  Ce  expressed as
 
   t  te  
N
(5) L  1  Pr(t |  )   K  1 C cos   P  P  t

O
t
Pr  te |  H   1  exp   B /(e0  273)    eB /(0  273)
(14)
  Ce  
 
R e H (i ) R E OG
   Ce i 1

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 III. TWO-STAGE OVERLOAD STRATEGY where Benefit represents power grid enterprise benefit,
The overload strategy is separated into two stages. In the describing the electricity sales profit, the costs include two
former stage, security requirements are ensured by considering parts, ILL cost (Cost1) and power loss on transformer (Cost2),
security constraints, including HST, failure rate and the expressed as
NO
operation risk. With these constraints, a preliminary strategy
can be obtained from the initial overload strategy. In the latter Benefit   K(i )CR cos  ( PE  POG )t (16)
i 1
stage, the economy is optimized. On the basis of stage 1, the NO
FAA( fH (i ) )t
load rate will be decreased repeatedly from preliminary Cost1    PT (17)
i 1 NIL
strategy to full-loading, and the final strategy can be generated
 
NO
Cost 2   P0   K (i )  Pk POG t
2
by analyzing benefits, costs and profits of all strategies. The (18)
flow chart of the proposed strategy is shown in Fig. 1. i 1

Stage-1: Security Constraints where θfH(i) represents the HST calculated under forecasting
Initial HST limit working condition on moment i, P0 and Pk are respectively no-
overload
Failure rate limit
load loss and rated-load loss of transformer.
strategy
In stage 2, searching the profit-optimal strategy between the
Operation risk limit
preliminary strategy and full-loading operation by analyzing
Stage-2: Economy Optimization
the overloading profit. The main steps of stage 2 are described
Benifits Costs Preliminary overload as follows:
strategy
max Profit
Step2-1: Calculate and record the benefit, costs and profit
of current strategy (The first strategy is preliminary strategy).
Final overload Step2-2: Judge the load rate of the current strategy, if the
strategy
transformer is not close to full-loading enough, turn to step2-3;
Fig. 1 Flow chart of two-stage overload strategy else, decrease the load rate with a small step size to update the
A. Stage-1: Security Constraints current strategy, and turn to the step2-1.
Step2-3: Among all strategies between preliminary strategy
In stage 1, if the security constraints in initial strategy are and full-loading operation, choose the profit-optimal strategy
violated, the load rate will be decreased to ensure overloading as the final strategy.
security, and preliminary strategy can be acquired. The main
In the two-stage strategy, both security and economy are
steps of stage 1 are described as follows and some coefficients
taken into consideration.
involved in iterations are shown in table I.
TABLE I. ITERATION COEFFICIENTS IV. CASE STUDY
Coefficients Denotation In this section, the proposed two-stage stategy is applied to
h Iterative step size
a certain scenario shown in Fig. 2, to make decision for
transformer overloading operation.
μ Load reduction ratio Transformer 1
Breaker 1
ε Termination criterion
Load
Transformer 2
Step1-1: The IEEE model is applied to calculate the Breaker 2
deterministic trend of transformer HST and failure rate
according to forecasting working condition. Fig. 2 Case scenario
Step1-2: Obtain the probabilistic distribution of HST, In this scenario, the load is supplied by two transformers,
calculate operation risk and risk limit. but transformer 2 needs to be out of service at some time,
Step1-3: For each constraint, compare the actual value with continuing for 4 hours (TEAO). An overload decision is needed
the limit, obtain the shortest allowed time as the allowed for transformer 1 (cooling type is ONAF). For sake of
overloading time TAO. simplicity, the following assumptions are made:
Step1-4: Compare TAO and expected allowed overloading  The power factor is always 0.9.
time TEAO: if 0<TAO - TEAO<ε, turn to stage 2; if TAO - TEAO>ε,  The sampling deviation of working condition does not
h=h/2, μ=μ-h; else, μ=μ+h. Turn to step1-5. exceed 10% of forecating value.
Step1-5: Decrease the load, K = (1-μ)Kf, turn to step1-1.  According to history data of consumers economic loss at
B. Stage-2: Economy Optimization power outage [19], CSL(t)= 41.5ln(t+30.19)-187.1 ($).
Other detailed information and parameters of transformer 1,
In traditional overload strategy, an important factor, IEEE model and Arrhenius-Weibull model are shown in table
economy, is rarely considered. Overloading economy, in this II, III and IV, and the load rate curves are shown in Fig. 3.
paper, is decribed as profit (Profit) of power grid enterprise
during overloading. And the objective function of economy TABLE II. BASIC PARAMETERS OF TRANSFORMER 1
optimization in stage 2 is expressed as NIL(years) CR(MVA) P0 (kW) Pk(kW) PT($) te(years)
max Profit  Benefit  Cost1  Cost 2 (15) 20 50 35. 2 184.3 4.3×106 10

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 Fig. 3 load rate curve of Transformer 1
(d) Composite risk and risk limit
TABLE III. PARAMETERS OF IEEE MODEL Fig. 4 Comparisons of load rate, HST, failure rate and risk
Parameter Value Parameter Value While making final strategy, the economy of overload
Empirical constant m 1.3 Empirical constant n 0.8 strategy is considered. The process of searching the profit-
optimal strategy between the preliminary strategy and full-
Oil time constant τo 150min Winding time constant τw 7min
loading state is shown in Fig. 5. The profit curve increases first
Top-oil rise 45K Winding hottest-spot rise 26K and then decreases, the maximum profit is 2298$. And the load
rate, HST, failure rate of final strategy curves are also shown in
TABLE IV. PARAMETERS OF ARRHENIUS-WEIBULL MODEL AND OTHER Fig. 4, the highest HST is 113.8℃ and the worst failure rate is
INFORMATION
1.28×10-6 times per hour. The final variation tendencies of four
∆t 𝜃0 PE POG
β B C risks are shown in Fig. 6, the biggest risk is society loss (SL)
(min) (℃) ($/kWh) ($/kWh) risk, while the smallest risk is risk of power grid enterprise loss
5.9 15000 1.76×10-12 3 110 0.094 0.08 (PGEL). During the overloading, risks of dielectric loss (DL)
and ILL change over the load rate, while almost no changes
A. Strategy Making occur in risks of PGEL and DL. The total execution time is 41
Applying the two-stage overload strategy, the load rate, seconds, 40 seconds for stage 1 and 1 second for stage2,
HST, fairlure rate comprisons between initial, preliminary and meeting the requirement of online computing.
final strategy, shown in Fig4(a)-(c). Variations of composite
risk and risk limit over iterations can also be acquired, shown
in Fig. 4(d).
In preliminary strategy, only security is considered. The
limits of HST and failure rate are set as 140℃ and 10-5 times
per hour. In the preliminary (initial) overload strategy, the
highest HST is 131.8(145.6)℃ and the worst failure rate is
7.93×10-6 (2.70×10-5) times per hour, both are smaller (greater)
than the limiting value. Besides, over the iterations, both
Fig. 5 Economy variation over iterations
composite risk and risk limit are decreasing. After 6 iteration
calculation, the composite risk 3243$ is smaller than the limit
3308$.

Fig. 6 The final variation tendencies of four types risk during overloading

(a) Load rate B. The Influence of Service Time

Since the NIL of example transformer is assumed as 20
years, the service time is changed from 1 to 19 years. The
influences of service time on preliminary and final overload
strategies are shown in Fig. 7. From Fig. 7(a), it is clearly that
the maximum load rate of preliminary and final strategies are
decreasing over service time if the uncertainty of HST is
(b) HST considered. Moreover, when the service time is 10 to 11 years,
the load rate of preliminary strategy starts to fall; while at about
15 years, the load rate final strategy starts to fall due to the
limit of preliminary strategy. Therefore, the profit curve shown
in Fig. 7(b) is similar to the maximum load rate curve of final
strategy. Besides of the basic HST constraint, when the
transformer is new (service time less than 10 years), the major
(c) Failure rate
limiting factor is found out the operation risk; when the

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transformer is relatively aged (service time more than 11 years),
the major limiting factor is failure rate.
(a) Maximum load rate
(b) profit of final strategy
Fig. 7 Influence of service time
V. CONCLUSION
A two-stage overload strategy for oil-immersed transformer
is provided in this paper. To incorporate transformer and the
nondeterministic factor, the probabilistic distribution of HST is
obtained based on the relevance between ambient temperature
and load. Preliminary strategy obtained from stage 1 can be
used in emergency overloading operation without economic
thinking. In stage 2, a balance point between security and
economy can be found.
By analyzing the influence of service time on overload
strategy, the increasing of service time leads to decreasing of
profit. And it is clear that preliminary strategy is more
influenced by service time than final strategy.
Compared with conventional overload strategy which only
considers HST and failure rate, the proposed strategy is more
practical and effective, since not only security demands, but
also economy requirements are considered in the proposed
two-stage strategy.
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