Ice accretion study of FXBW4-220 transmission line composite insulators and anti-icing geometry optimization

Abstract

Ice accretion seriously degrades the insulation performance of insulators of power lines, causing flashover and tripping accidents and even resulting in large-scale power outage. Most of the existing research work about iced insulators focus on the electrical discharge and flashover characteristics instead of the ice accretion process. In this paper, CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) based parametric numerical study is carried out to investigate the ice accretion and its effects on FXBW4-220 composite insulators at different environmental and geometric conditions. To verify the numerical results, experimental study is also performed in the artificial climate chamber. Results show that the ice accretion on insulator increased with the augment of environmental parameters including V (wind velocity), T (atmospheric temperature), MVD (droplets median volume diameter) and LWC (liquid water content). A parametric geometric study is also performed to investigate its effects on ice accretion and suggestions are made on optimal geometric configuration for minimizing the ice accretion on insulators.