Assessment of composite insulator’s behavior during the aging of its housing material

During the lifetime of a High Voltage composite insulator, the housing of that latter is exposed to stress conditions. Those exposures alter the insulating behavior of the insulator in term of Electrical field (E-field) distribution and, consequently, the leakage current flow. The assessment of that evolution is an important parameter to be considered during the design of the insulator in order to prevent additional stresses such as dry band arcing which is caused by the leakage current increase. In this paper, an attempt has been made to build a model based on the Finite Element Method (FEM) for the calculation of the E-field distribution around a composite insulator. This model was used to assess the impact of the aging of the housing material. A program was developed in order to minimize the effect of the aging of the housing. That optimization was done by modifying the construction parameters of the insulator.