Calculation of leakage current density of silicone rubber insulators under accelerated aging conditions

Abstract

The paper presents two different methods to calculate the current density along silicone rubber (SiR) insulator surface under salt-fog testing conditions. The first method which is based on field theory approach uses the commercial software COMSOL ® to compute the current density. The conductivity of the contamination layer used in the calculations was extracted from the measured equivalent salt deposit density (ESDD) separately for different regions of the insulator surfaces. The second method is based on circuit theory approach. The insulator surface was divided into different sections for resistance calculations to account for different contamination levels. Rankings based on the calculated current densities based on segmentation of the insulator surface for ESDD measurements match with those extracted from measured leakage currents.