Influence of Pollution Degree and Humidity on Surface Discharge Characteristics of Insulators

Insulators are an essential part of overhead transmission and distribution lines, which have the functions of electrical insulation and mechanical connection. Insulator pollution flashover is a serious threat to the safe and stable operation of the power system, so it is of great significance to grasp the insulation status of polluted insulators in time. In order to explore the influence of pollution degree and humidity on insulator surface discharge characteristics, this paper built an artificial fog chamber to conduct insulator artificial pollution test. According to the test results, the fitting function expressions among the number of discharge photons, the gain of UV imager and the shooting distance was obtained. And, it was concluded that the higher the pollution degree of insulators and the higher the humidity, the more photons by the domestic zt301 UV imager could shoot the polluted insulators, which provided a reference for the subsequent onsite inspection of operating state of insulators on transmission lines using UV imager.