Insulation failure caused by special pollution around industrial environments

Abstract

In the recently years, the industrial process has increased his production, in this way, the energy consumption has grown significantly with more substations and overhead lines around the industrial plants with lime production. There are many challenges in this kind of industry. One of the main polluting agents is the lime, in a Gold concentrator plant for power substation. The lime is composed primarily of hydroxide, oxides, and their composed. The porcelain is usually used for the insulation between the electrical devices as the circuit breaker, Insulators, current transformers, surge arresters, among others. The insulation has some changes with the climatic change and his manifestation as the moisture, fog, rain and snow. Although the electrical engineering has important advances, about the insulation and maintenance, the insulation failure caused by lime pollution and fog condition has an important relevance, associated to the partial and corona discharge, this condition has been found in the insulation associated to the bus bar Insulators. The main characteristic is the influence of lime and fog, in an area of heavy pollution with high voltage substations. In this research, the partial and corona discharges are described in the section 2, with the electronic devices for the diagnosis and the description of the components for the failure in the insulation, besides, in the section 3 is described the case study with the largest Industrial process in Chile associated to the main substation in 220 kV. In addition, the section 4 has the results and discussion about this phenomenon with the alternatives for assessment and corrections in this environment, accordingly, the results of this research should make available a reference to improve the efficiency of the maintenance and fault diagnosis.