Electrical Field Modeling and Tracking Performance of RTV Silicone Rubber Composite Insulation

Room temperature vulcanized (RTV) silicone rubber is significantly engaged for high voltage outdoor insulation for its superb hydrophobic and pollution flashover performance. However, it tends to degrade in form of carbon tracking and erosion due to severe ohmic heating and dry band arcing activities on its surface. This work reports the physical carbon tracking and r.m.s leakage current along with electrical field distribution results. RTV 615 and alumina fillers with size of 50 nm were used for the synthesis of test samples in this research. The inclined plane test (IPT) experimental setup was built according to IEC Std. 60587. The HVAC was applied according to protocol 2 of the standard. The experiment was started with initial stress of 3.0 kV with a contamination flow rate of 0.3 ml per minute and it was increased by 0.25 kV per hour. Results suggest that electric field stress was higher along the tapered section of the contamination solution. Moreover, RTV silicone rubber nanocomposites exhibit lower tracking length and it is linearly decreased with alumina increasing contents. Furthermore, a consistent trend is observed in r.m.s leakage current results. It is concluded that 10wt% emerged as a promising candidate in term of tracking and leakage current results relatively.