Flashover characteristics of discrete water droplets on the surface of super-hydrophobic silicone rubber

Super-hydrophobic silicone rubber (SIR) was fabricated by hot-pressing template method, and its surface water droplet contact angle reached 153.5° and sliding angle 8°. The observation of microstructure showed that there were plenty micrometer-scale papillas and nanometer-scale particles on its surface, the mechanism of superhydrophobicity caused by this micro-nano hierarchical structure was discussed. In order to study the influence of super-hydrophobicity on the electric field distribution, twodimensional simulation was carried out in software platform ANSYS. The influence of contact angle, volume and location was discussed. The simulation results indicated that super-hydrophobic surface had a better effect of electric field shielding. The flashover experiments (for both single and double droplets on different SIR surface) were carried out and showed that the flashover voltage of super-hydrophobic SIR with droplets on its surface was higher than that of ordinary SIR, which confirmed the simulation.