Technical Report No.1414

No. 1414

Technical Issues for Application of Polymer Long-rod and Hollow Core Insulators

Investigating R&D Committee on the Technical Issues for Application of Polymer Long-rod and Hollow Core Insulators

Keyword :

Polymer insulators, Field experiences, Aging, Contamination

Polymer long-rod and hollow core insulators with silicone rubber as housing material have various different characteristics (merits and demerits) compared with the conventional ceramic ones. The polymer insulators have been applied to transmission, substation, distribution power facilities and also railway power devices among the distribution to EHV systems. Approx. 25 years ago in Japan, investigations and discussions of polymer insulators have been energetically accomplished. Hence, application examples in Japan and overseas countries and identification of technical issues for actual application were only introduced.
The investigation committee surveyed utilization and its reasons of polymer devices mainly made by hydrophobic silicone rubber in Japan. In addition, surface discharge phenomena under contaminated and wetted condition, typical failure events, diagnostics techniques, contamination performance and so on, were considered.
Our main activities were as follows:
(1) Consideration between discharge and deterioration phenomena on the contaminated and wetted polymer surface
(2) Application survey of polymer insulator in Japan and typical failure events and reasons
(3) Contamination accumulation and withstand voltage characteristics
(4) Evaluations of various ageing test procedures and artificial contamination voltage tests, and discussions of insulation design of polymer insulators
These investigations provided the lots of technical issues in light of application for domestic peculiar contamination conditions. There are still remaining subjects, e.g. artificial acceleration ageing and contamination voltage test methods and also the concept of insulation design and so forth.