Experimental and numerical investigation of alumina trihydrate effect for improvement of polymer flashover voltage strength

Abstract

Flashover voltage is considered one of the important factors affect the Power system reliability. Environmental conditions and filling of insulators are parameters should be considered in flashover voltage evaluation. In this work, laboratory studies are carried out on insulator with Alumina Trihydrate [ATH] filling at different concentration and different weather conditions to investigate the flashover voltage. The evaluation of flashover voltage is carried out at three conditions dry, wet and salt wet condition. In each test, four different lengths with different filling concentration are considered. Several curve fitting methods are used to obtain an equation of flashover voltage. The obtained equation first is only function of filling at different insulator lengths with approximately zero errors. Although the accuracy of this method, it gives flashover voltage only at discrete lengths. Thus, for continuous length validation the flashover is fitted again to be a function of both length and filling.

Keywords

• Flashover voltage
• Insulators
• Filling materials
• Curve fitting