Abstract
Due to high humidity, the ageing of room temperature vulcanized silicone rubber (RTV) has been a serious problem in Southwestern China. In order to solve the problem of RTV life prediction, the aging classification method was established by analyzing the microtopography of RTV samples in this paper. Besides, the comprehensive analysis of RTV element content, partial element content ratio, and major chemical groups of RTV samples in each aging level were conducted. It is found that as the ageing level increases, the element contents of C, Si, O, Al change accordingly and the ratio of C:Si drops from 2.39 to 1.54, and absorption peaks of the chemical groups of Si-(CH3)2, Si-O-Si, Si-CH3 and C-H in CH3 decrease. This work can enrich the investigation of RTV, and may provide useful reference for performance evaluation and replacement of RTV in substations.
Highlights
In recent years, due to the excellent hydrophobicity and anti-pollution performance, RTV has been widely used in transformer substations [1,2,3]
It is indicated that C element in the molecular chain of the samples decreases while O element increases at the same time, which is caused by the serious oxidation with aging level increases [19]
The experiment focused on the aging characteristics and evaluation methods of RTV silicone rubber in high humidity area
Summary
Due to the excellent hydrophobicity and anti-pollution performance, RTV has been widely used in transformer substations [1,2,3]. Outdoor insulation performance of RTV is determined by its surface state, researchers have carried out a lot of work on polymers surface condition monitoring [7,8,9]. Kumagai proposed an easy method to evaluate the state of the polymer surface by adopting the leakage current characteristics [13]. The relationship between physical and chemical properties and surface state can reveal the changing mechanism of RTV. The hydrophobicity, mechanical test, leakage current test, Fourier infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and scanning electron microscope (SEM) test are analyzed to study the influence of the multi-stress aging on high temperature vulcanized silicone rubber [14,15,16]. The relationships between physical and chemical properties and surface state are established by adopting a variety of detecting methods
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