Long-term conductivity decrease of polyethylene and polypropylene insulation materials

This work summarizes the results of a number of DC conductivity measurement studies on polypropylene (PP), low density polyethylene (LDPE), and cross linked polyethylene (XLPE). The main observation is that under apparently time-constant external conditions (voltage, temperature, etc.) no steady-state direct current (DC) was established even after very long measurement times. Nevertheless, this behavior seems to exhibit some common systematic features, and since the experiments were performed with different equipment at different R&D labs in different years by different teams, simple measurement artefacts can be excluded. One observation is that there are two electric field regimes with slightly different behavior, separated by crossover field of about 10–15 kV/mm. In this work we focus on the high-field region, where the main observation is that the conductance slowly decays sub-linearly with time, I∼ t
⁻ⁿ
, with 0.3 < n < 1, n mostly around 0.5. We provide experimental indications that this behavior is rather independent of the presence of 1) the voltage and 2) the peroxide decomposition products (in PE). The observations are in favor of an underlying thermally driven relaxation process related to structural changes (morphology, free volume) of the polymer. A main implication of the results is that the use of steady-state conductivity values for the characterization of certain polymer insulation is not appropriate and instead the decaying behavior of the conduction current must be considered.