Effect of hydrophobicity coating on insulator icing and DC flashover performance of iced insulators

How to decrease the ice on insulators and increase the flashover voltage of iced insulator are hot topics of power system in the world. Many tests have been carried out to investigate whether the permanent room temperature vulcanized (PRTV) coating can change the electrical characteristics of iced insulators both in laboratory and field. Firstly, the test to investigate the icing and electrical characteristic of dc insulator with PRTV coating was carried out. Moreover, comparison has been made between artificial polluted insulator and field polluted insulators. Results indicate that the PRTV coating can not decrease the ice accretion on insulators. Instead, it results in accumulating more ice at the beginning of icing regime, but the influence of PRTV coating will not be remarkable to accumulate ice when there is heavy ice on insulators. . In addition, the PRTV coating can decrease the flashover voltage by 10%. It is also revealed that the flashover voltage for the artificial polluted insulators is lower than that of the field polluted insulators due to the non-uniform of the natural pollution.