Assessment of charge behavior in electrical tree of composite material based on characteristics of PD waveform

Electric tree is a phenomenon of local dielectric breakdown with partial discharge (PD). It is also the final stage of insulation deterioration. The electrical treeing has been discussed by using conventional PD parameters such as the generation phase, charge amount and so on. Since the obtained PD waveforms were processed by an analog filter designed according to the frequency characteristics of the measurement instrument such as an oscilloscope, its waveform is a convolution of the original PD waveform and the transfer function of the measurement system. However, the feature values such as a rise time, fall time and frequency spectrum in the original PD waveform should show the behavior of electrons and ions in the discharge space. In this paper, the original PD waveforms generated in micro-silica/epoxy composite with the electrical tree were acquired, and the feature values of the original PD waveform were analyzed. In addition, the behavior of the electric charges in the discharge space was assessed from the change of the feature values.