Corona resistance of fluorinated LDPE and XLPE

In the power system, insulating materials have to endure corona for quite long time, which may cause serious deterioration of the insulation performance. In this work, low density polyethylene (LDPE) and cross-linked polyethylene (XLPE) were directly fluorinated with different duration, and the corona resistance was characterized. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) was used to inspect the morphology variation of samples' surface and cross-section. The chemical changes before and after different corona duration of the samples were examined by infrared (IR) spectroscopy. Experimental results show that the fluorination on both LDPE and XLPE is beneficial to improving the corona resistance. The fluorinated XLPE exhibits better corona resistance than that of fluorinated LDPE.