The insulator used for the transmission line is a device that is bonded with a cap, pin, ceramic, and cement to withstand insulation capacity and mechanical load. The insulator design can help to reduce the dispersion of the electric field; thus, the optimization of today’s design, especially as demanded power grows, is critical. The designs of four manufacturers were used to perform a comparative analysis. Under dry circumstances of the new product, an electric field distribution study was done with no pollutants attached. Manufacturer D’s design has the best voltage uniformity of 24.33% and the arc length of 500 mm or more. Manufacturer C’s design has an equalizing voltage of more than 2% higher than that of other manufacturers. The importance of the design of the insulator and the number of connections according to the installation conditions is very efficient for transmission lines that will increase in the future.
In this paper, we investigated the surface properties of polymer insulators to improve electrical insulation performance. First, after washing the polymer insulator in various ways, its contact angle was increased, thereby improving the hydrophobic properties and electrical insulation properties. In addition, TiO2 thin films, which have been used as a photocatalytic material and have been applied to the polymer insulator surface of to enhance the surface and electrical insulating properties. For the sputtering method, the contact angle after coating the TiO2 thin film increased with increasing RF power, but it was lower compared to that before coating, indicating that the hydrophobic properties of the surface were slightly deteriorated. Consequently, the electrical properties of the polymer-insulating material were maintained or improved after the TiO2 thin-film coating.
This study proposes a crack identification algorithm to analyze the surface condition of porcelain insulators and to efficiently visualize cracks. The proposed image processing algorithm for crack identification consists of two primary steps. In the first step, the brightness is eliminated by converting the image to the lab color space. Then, the background is removed by the K-means clustering method. After that, the optimum image treatment is applied using morphological image processing and median filtering to remove unnecessary noise, such as blobs. In the second step, the preprocessed image is converted to grayscale, and any cracks present in the image are identified. Next, the region properties, such as the number of pixels and the ratio of the major to the minor axis, are used to separate the cracks from the noise. Using this image processing algorithm, the precision of crack identification for all the sample images was approximately 80%, and the F1 score was approximately 70. Thus, this method can be helpful for efficient crack monitoring.
This study examines the feasibility of the image deep learning method using convolution neural networks (CNNs) to maintain a porcelain insulator. Data augmentation is performed to prevent over-fitting, and the classification performance is evaluated by training the age, material, region, and pollution level of the insulator using image data in which the background and labelling are removed. Based on the results, it was difficult to predict the age, but it was possible to classify 76% of the materials, 60% of the pollution level, and more than 90% of the regions. From the results of this study, we identified the potential and limitations of the CNN classification for the four groups currently classified. However, it was possible to detect discoloration of the porcelain insulator resulting from physical, chemical, and climatic factors. Based on this, it will be possible to estimate the corrosion of the cap and discoloration of the porcelain caused by environmental deterioration, abnormal voltage, and lightning.
This paper investigates the soundness of porcelain insulators associated with the acoustic emission (AE) technique. The AE technique is a popular non-destructive method that measures and analyzes the burst energy that occurs mainly when a crack occurs in a high-frequency region. Typical AE methods require continuous monitoring with frequent sensor calibration. However, in this study, the AE technique excites a porcelain insulator using only an impact hammer, and it applies a high-pass filter to the signal frequency range measured only in the AE sensor by comparing the AE and the acceleration sensors. Next, the extracted time-domain signal is analyzed for the damage assessment. In normal signals, the duration is about 2ms, the area of the envelope is about 1,000, and the number of counts is about 20. In the damage signal, the duration exceeds 5ms, the area of the envelope is about 2,000, and the number of counts exceeds 40. In addition, various characteristics in the time and frequency domain for normal and damage cases are analyzed using the short-time Fourier transform (STFT). Based on the results of the STFT analysis, the maximum energy of a normal specimen is less than 0.02, while in the case of the damage specimen, it exceeds 0.02. The extracted high-frequency components can present dynamic behavior of crack regions and eigenmodes of the isolated insulator parts, but the presence, size, and distribution of cracks can be predicted indirectly. In this regard, the characteristics of the surface crack region were derived in this study.
An experimental study was conducted using the tracking wheel test (IEC 62217) method for evaluating the performance of insulator materials, in particular ethylene propylene diene monomer (EPDM) and silicone rubber. In addition, we studied the tracking characteristics resulting from applying the same method for the shape of the insulator housing, that is, the performance of regular and alternating sheds. The evaluation parameters were leakage current, surface characteristics, SEM, EDX, hydrophobicity, and temperature distribution; likewise, we applied the commercial frequency dry (and wet) flashover voltage test. We found that the regular shed had a greater leakage current than the alternating shed and that the recovery of the hydrophobicity in terms of rest time was greater than that of the EPDM in terms of leakage current. All of the regular-shed insulators of silicone rubber had tracking traces and choking on the sheath parting line, while the alternating shed showed only choking at the interface but no tracking traces. Therefore, it can be concluded that the commercial frequency wet flashover voltage of the silicone rubber with regular shed before and after the tracking wheel test is higher than that of the alternating shed.
Porcelain insulators are typically exposed to surface discharge and lightning impulse in service. This study investigates the insulation characteristics of the external and internal discharges of a porcelain insulator with respect to its flashover for a 154 kV transmission line. The experiments are also conducted using a wet flashover test and an impulse test based on the external discharge and the internal penetration, to classify the flashover voltage-time curve of the porcelain insulator. When an impulse with a strength of 2,500 kV/μs was applied three times to 6.5 mm ceramic samples, electrical penetration of approximately 70% occurred. The impulse experiment confirmed that the electrical penetration inside the porcelain insulator coincided with the area where the electric field was concentrated. The wet flashover voltage test revealed that the flashover threshold voltage increases by approximately 7% after cleaning of the surface.
Porcelain insulators have been used for a long time in 154 kV power transmission lines. They are likely to be exposed to sudden failure because of product deterioration. This study was conducted to evaluate the quality of porcelain insulators. After stresses were applied, the damaged regions of aged insulators were investigated in terms of chemical composition, material structure, and other properties. For porcelain insulators that were in service for a long time, the mechanical failure load was 126 kN, whereas the average mechanical failure load was 167.3 kN for new products. It was also determined that corrosion occurred at the metal pin part due to the penetration of moisture into the gap between the pin and the ceramic. Statistical analyses of failure were performed to identify the portion of the insulators that were broken. Cristobalite porcelain insulators fabricated without alumina additives had a high failure rate of 54% for the porcelain component. In the case of the addition of Alumina (Al2O3) to the porcelain insulators to improve the strength of the ceramic component, a more frequent damage rate of the cap and pin of 73.3% and 27%, respectively, was observed. This study reports on the material component of SiO2 and the percentage of alumina added, with respect to the mechanical properties of porcelain insulators.
In the Airport Railroad, the Yeongjong Bridge has a length of 4,420 m and connects Yeongjong Island with the mainland of Incheon City. The bridge is a two-level structure, consisting of a six-lane road at the upper level and a combination of a road and railroad at the lower level. The environmental conditions for the electric railway come mainly from the salt injury area and a heavy industry zone, and the maintenance cycles are determined differently depending on these conditions. This study analyzed the deterioration characteristics of long rod insulators produced with a movable ceramic bracket and polymer materials in the Yeongjong Bridge section of the Airport Railway operating in the salt injury area according to the material characteristics. Comparison of the corona measurements when the insulators were cleaned at the same time showed that the polymer insulator had a higher insulation performance than the ceramic insulator.
Porcelain insulators have been used mainly for power line fixing and electrical insulation in transmission towers. Porcelain insulators have generally a 30 years desired life, but over 50% exceed their life expectancy. Since the damage to porcelain insulators is usually accompanied by enormous loss of human resource material, their efficient maintenance has emerged as an important issue. In this regard, this study applied a frequency response function (FRF) for integrity assessment of the insulator. The characteristics of the FRF according to damage types were identified and analyzed by the change in natural frequencies, curve shape, attenuation, and Nyquist diagram stability. The results showed significant differences in the FRF according to damage types, which can be used as basic data for the effective integrity assessment of porcelain insulators.
Insulators used in overhead transmission lines are continuously exposed to a number of mechanical and electrical stresses owing to external environmental factors, resulting in corrosion, reduction in durability, and deterioration. Widely used porcelain insulators are fabricated with cement and porcelain and are especially common in Korea. Changes in the hardness and chemical reactivity of the cement increase the leakage and fault currents and increase the possibility of flashover due to insulation breakdown. Therefore, it is important to evaluate the durability and defects of porcelain insulators. Studies on the reliability of various evaluation methods are needed to prevent accidents by accurately determining the replacement timing and potential defects in porcelain insulators. In this study, the hardness of the cement part of the porcelain insulator was measured using the Vickers hardness test and its composition was analyzed by energy dispersive spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction analysis. The performance of the insulators was compared in two different regions with varying climatic conditions. This study presents an evaluation method of the defects in porcelain insulators by measuring humidity, which can also be used to assess the reliability of the insulators.
Hybrid insulators that have the advantages of both porcelain (high mechanical strength and chemical stability) as well as polymer (light weight and high resistance to pollution) insulators, can be used in place of individual porcelain and polymer insulators that are used for both mechanical support as well as electrical insulation of overhead power transmission lines. The most significant feature of hybrid insulators is the presence of porcelain/polymer interfaces where the porcelain and polymer are physically bonded. Individual porcelain and polymer insulators do not have such porcelain/polymer interfaces. Although the interface is expected to affect the mechanical/electrical properties of the hybrid insulator, systematic studies of the adhesion properties at the porcelain/polymer interface and the effect of the interface on the insulation characteristics and electric field distribution of the hybrid insulator have not been reported. In this study, we fabricated small hybrid insulator specimens with various types of interfaces and investigated the effect of the porcelain/polymer interface on the microstructure, insulating characteristics, and electric field distribution of the hybrid insulators. It was observed that the porcelain/polymer interface of the hybrid insulator does not have a significant effect on the insulating characteristics and electric field distribution, and the hybrid insulator can exhibit electrical insulating properties that are similar or superior to those of individual porcelain and polymer insulators.
It is extremely important to improve methodologies for the lifetime assessment of porcelain insulators. While there has been a considerable amount of work regarding the phenomena of lifetime distributions, most of the studies assume that aging distributions follow the Weibull distribution. However, the true underlying distribution is unknown, giving rise to unrealistic inferences, such as parameter estimations. In this article, we review several distributions that are commonly used in reliability and survival analysis, such as the exponential, Weibull, log-normal, and gamma distributions. Some properties, including the characteristics of failure rates of these distributions, are presented. We use a Bayesian approach for model selection and parameter estimation procedures. A well-known measure, called the Bayes factor, is used to find the most plausible model among several contending models. The posterior mean can be used as a parameter estimate for unknown parameters, once a model with the highest posterior probability is selected. Extensive simulation studies are performed to demonstrate our methodologies.
The resistive memory switching characteristics of resistive random access memory (ReRAM) using the amorphous GeSe thin film have been demonstrated at Al/Ti/GeSe/n+ poly Si structure. This ReRAM indicated bipolar resistive memory switching characteristics. The generation and the recombination of chalcogen cations and anions were suitable to explain the bipolar switching operation. Space charge limited current (SCLC) model and Poole-Frenkel emission is applied to explain the formation of conductive filament in the amorphous GeSe thin film. The results showed characteristics of stable switching and excellent reliability. Through the annealing condition of 400℃, the possibility of low temperature process was established. Very low operation current level (set current: ~ μA, reset current: ~ nA) was showed the possibility of low power consumption. Particularly, n+ poly Si based GeSe ReRAM could be applied directly to thin film transistor (TFT).
For the improvement of the anti-pollution properties of porcelain electrical insulators, in this study, we have applied the functional film to the surface of insulator. The functional films were coated on the ceramic substrates which components were like the porcelain electrical insulator. The coating material was applied to ceramic substrate by spray coating method and then the film was cured at around 300oC for 10 minutes with different gas ambient, such as O2, N2, and only vacuum. We have measured the contact angle of the coated surface, and obtained the lowest angle (8.9o) and a strong hydrophilic property at vacuum condition. The anti-pollution properties were measured, revealing that as the contact angle decreased, the anti-pollution properties improved. The mechanical hardness and adhesion were both excellent regardless of the annealing ambient.
Transparent thin film transistors (TTFT) were fabricated on N+ Si wafers. SiO2, Si3N4/SiO2 and Al2O3/SiO2 grown on the wafers were used as gate insulators. The rf magnetron sputtered zinc tin oxide (ZTO) films were adopted as active layers. N+Si wafers were wet-oxidized to grow SiO2. Si3N4 and Al2O3 films were deposited on the SiO2 by plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) and atomic layer deposition (ALD), respectively. The mobility, Ion/Ioff and subthreshold swing (SS) were obtained from the transfer characteristics of TTFTs. The properties of gate insulators were analyzed by comparing the characteristics of TTFTs. The property variation of the ZTO TTFTs with time were observed.
In this paper, in order to suppress unwanted current paths originating from adjacent cells in a passive crossbar array based on resistive random access memory (RRAM) without extrinsic switching devices, 1-diode type RRAM which consists of a 0.2% chromium-doped strontium titanate (Cr-SrTiO3) film deposited on a silicon substrate, was proposed for high packing density, and intrinsic rectifying characteristics from the current versus voltage characteristics were successfully demonstrated.
Harmonics Analysis of Leakage Current due to Artificial Contamination of Distribution Arresters Jae-Jun Park The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers.2012; 61(9): 1306. CrossRef
Analysis of Leakage Current Waveforms for Transmission Line Porcelain Insulators due to ESDD Contamination Jae-Jun Park The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers.2012; 61(10): 1461. CrossRef
Harmonics Analysis of Leakage Current due to Artificial Contamination of Distribution Arresters Jae-Jun Park The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers.2012; 61(9): 1306. CrossRef
Analysis of Leakage Current Waveforms for Transmission Line Porcelain Insulators due to ESDD Contamination Jae-Jun Park The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers.2012; 61(10): 1461. CrossRef
Highly Sensitive Partial Discharge Sensor with Remote Monitoring Capabilities Kyoo-Nam Choi The Journal of the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences.2015; 10(3): 349. CrossRef
Harmonics Analysis of Leakage Current due to Artificial Contamination of Distribution Arresters Jae-Jun Park The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers.2012; 61(9): 1306. CrossRef