The Development of Parallel Discharges on Insulating Surfaces of Different Sizes Uniformly Polluted

Our work consists of studying the development of parallel discharges, on insulating surfaces with different widths and uniformly polluted, put under alternating voltage, the influence parameters considered in this work are the width of the polluted surface, its degree of contamination and the line of flight. The tests were carried out on a surface of a rectangular glass having variable dimensions, different shapes of electrodes (pointes-pointes; pointes-plane; plane-plane) were used. The visualization of the parallel discharges was carried out by a fast camera connected to a PC for image processing using appropriate software. The experimental results obtained from this study show that there is a width limitation, from which two successive electric arcs can develop independently of each other. It has been noted that this effective width of limitation is not influenced at all by the variation in the conductivity of the polluting layer, but it causes the reduction in the performance of the insulation.