Image Saturation as a Tool to Understand the Corona Induced Degradation of Polymeric Insulators

This paper presents a novel method of utilizing pixel saturation of digital images of corona discharges to assess the degradation of polymeric insulating samples. A total of 20 corona images with varying exposure time from 0.5 to 120 s are captured and the image pixel intensity along the reference line is obtained. It is observed that the profile of saturated images taken with the higher exposure time provides accurate detection of the degraded portion of the sample and the degradation is confirmed and quantified using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR).