Flashover process and frequency analysis of the leakage current on insulator model under non-uniform pollution conditions

In this paper, we present results dealing with the non-uniform pollution carried out under 50 Hz applied voltage on a plane model simulating the 1512 L outdoor insulator largely used by the Algerian Company of Gas and Electric Power (SONELGAZ). Many configurations in non-uniform pollution are studied in the ENP's (Ecole Nationale Polytechnique d'Alger) High Voltage Laboratory in order to analyze the impact of polluted layer distribution on the insulator dielectric performances. The polluted solution has a conductivity of 1.2 mS/cm obtained with distilled water and NaCl. Our investigations are particularly focused on the on line monitoring of both position and width of the contaminated layer. The flashover voltage and the leakage current magnitude have been investigated in order to study the flashover process on this insulating surface. A video apparatus is used to reflect the parallel discharges behavior, appearing when the polluted layer reaches a critical width. Phase angle values between applied voltage and leakage current (LC) signals at the fundamental frequency (50 Hz) are calculated using the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) spectral analysis. Phase angle measurements indicate that the equivalent impedance of the insulator behaves like RC circuit with a high capacitive effect engendered by the pre-established clean band. This effect decreases when electric discharges occur at a particular voltage level. The Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) is adopted for the leakage current decomposition in several time-frequency bands. The STD-MRA (Standard deviation-Multi Resolution Analysis) of these frequency bands is calculated and is employed to choose the most interesting details that detect both position and width increasing of the conducting layer. Reported results show that the pollution surface state and the severity of this conducting layer deposited on insulator surface could be identified from the STD-MRA representation of leakage current frequency bands. It was shown that the high frequency band of the leakage current increases before the final flashover when the polluted layer is located in the middle of the plane model. It was established that a good correlation has been found between the insulator state surface and details of the leakage current obtained through the DWT decomposition. In fact, these details provide relevant information on both position and width of the polluted layer nonuniformly distributed on the insulator surface.