Performance of insulators under variation of pollution, inclined angle, and temperature based on the design of experiment

Abstract

The environmental conditions significantly impact the performance of the transmission line insulators. The current work investigated some variables that influence the flashover and breakdown voltages, such as insulator pollution (P), insulator inclined angles with the cross-arm (A), and insulator temperature (T). A prediction equation can be developed using Box-Behnken Design (BBD) to relate the input variables (P, A, and T) and the flashover voltage (VFO). BBD is a rotatable second-order design requiring three levels of each variable, influencing a specific experiment response. A statistical analysis was carried out to identify the significant variables affecting voltage VFO. So, the main objective of the work is to investigate the effect of P, A, and T on the VFO and use Box Behnken Design (BBD) to predict the value of VFO when the information about P, A, and T is available without requiring any experimental works. The results illustrated a prediction equation that facilitates the prediction of the voltage VFO if new values of the input parameters are known. The prediction error of the constructed equation was less than 5 % for a total number of 21 new data samples used to test and verify the robustness of the prediction equation.