Study on Surface Rainwater and Arc Characteristics of High-Voltage Bushing With Booster Sheds Under Heavy Rainfall

The flashover performance of insulators can be improved by BS (booster sheds) in the rain, which is mainly attributed to the reasons that BS break up long cascades of water and block connections of arcs. However, surface rainwater characteristics and arc characteristics of bushing have not been quantitatively studied under heavy rainfall. In this article, the artificial rain tests were conducted on a 500 kV transformer high-voltage bushing equipped with and without BS under the rainfall intensity of 10 mm/min. X (the total length of water column) and L
_arc
(the critical length of arc) on the bushing surface were taken as the feature parameters of surface rainwater characteristics and arc characteristics, respectively. The effects of BS on E
_h
(the rain flashover voltage gradient along the insulation height), X and L
_arc
were investigated, respectively. Furtherly, the relationships were studied among Eh, X and L
_arc
. Results indicate that E
_h
has a sharp rise as the number of BS (NBS) is from one to two, however the rise of E
_h
gradually decreases when NBS exceeds two. X decreases while L
_arc
increases with the rise of NBS, however both the change ranges of them continually fall. Furthermore, L
_arc
presents remarkable negative correlation to X because of the effect of the electric field. E
_h
rises nonlinearly with the decrease of X, which is due to the change of the wetting uniformity on the bushing surface and the potential redistribution along air gaps in the presence of the local arc.