Abstract
Silicone rubber material is widely used in high-voltage external insulation systems due to its excellent hydrophobicity and hydrophobicity transfer performance. However, silicone rubber is a polymeric material with a poor ability to resist electrical tracking and erosion; therefore, some fillers must be added to the material for performance enhancement. The inclined plane test is a standard method used for evaluating the tracking and erosion resistance by subjecting the materials to a combination of voltage stress and contaminate droplets to produce failure. This test is time-consuming and difficult to apply in field inspection. In this paper, a new and faster way to evaluate the tracking and erosion resistance performance is proposed using laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS). The influence of filler content on the tracking and erosion resistance performance was studied, and the filler content was characterized by thermogravimetric analysis and the LIBS technique. In this paper, the tracking and erosion resistance of silicone rubber samples was correctly classified using principal component analysis (PCA) and neural network algorithms based on LIBS spectra. The conclusions of this work are of great significance to the performance characterization of silicone rubber composite materials.
Highlights
Insulators of high-voltage transmission lines usually gather large amounts of contamination on their surface after long-term operation in an outdoor environment [1]
Silicone rubber materials are mainly used in the external insulation field, such as in high temperature vulcanized (HTV) silicone rubber insulators and room temperature vulcanized (RTV) silicone rubber coatings
All types of samples were subjected to the inclined plane test, the details and a summary of the Allare types of samples to the inclined test, detailsrubber and amaterial summary of the results shown in Tableswere andsubjected
Summary
Insulators of high-voltage transmission lines usually gather large amounts of contamination on their surface after long-term operation in an outdoor environment [1]. Silicone rubber materials are widely used in electrical power systems for their excellent hydrophobicity and hydrophobicity transfer performance compared with ceramic materials, which is a key point in the anti-pollution flashover problem [2,3]. Silicone rubber insulators face challenges when serving in outdoor environments. Dry band arcing is generated on the insulator surface due to the contamination when the hydrophobicity of insulators is temporarily lost, and the silicone rubber material will be ablated due to thermal degradation. Fillers are widely added to silicone rubber material to improve its tracking and erosion resistance performance [4,5,6].
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