The Characterization of Electrical Insulating Oils by High-Performance Liquid Chromatography

A new method for the characterization of electrical insulating oils, which employs the recently-developed technique of high-performance liquid chromatography, is presented. The method is simple and rapid. It provides "fingerprints" of oils, with information about their molecular size distribution, aromatic types and their degree of alkylation. These fingerprints can be used to identify unmarked samples of oils and to differentiate, for the purposes of fault diagnosis, the typical degradations (e. g. polymerization or cracking) undergone by oils in service.