Optimal Design of Support Insulators Using Hashing Integrated Genetic Algorithm and Optimized Charge Simulation Method

This paper proposes a combined approach of optimized charge simulation method (CSM) and hashing integrated adaptive genetic algorithm (HAGA) to the contour design of support insulators. In the combined approach, the HAGA determines the optimal displacement ratio and number of fictitious charges used in CSM, and then obtains the optimal contour design to minimize and uniform the tangential electric field along the dielectric boundary based on the optimized CSM. The proposed HAGA method considerably improves the execution efficiency by accessing the fitness values of the searched solutions saved a priori in a hashing table during the optimization process. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, three cases of different contours of support insulators have been studied. Results show that rather uniform and minimal tangential field distributions along the insulator surfaces can be effectively derived by the proposed approaches to achieve promising performance and higher probability free from flashover.