Study on polymer insulators in air discharge

As one of methods of improving performance of an air circuit breaker, polymer materials are used in its quenching chamber. When the arc touches the polymer, the polymer is melted and ablated. An ablation gasses are exhausted at the time, and the ablation gasses introduce cooling effect, pressure increase and contraction of the arc. By making good use of these behaviors, quenching performance of the air circuit breaker can be improved. In order to clarify the quenching characteristics of each material, we focus on the difference of the quenching performances among the polymer materials. This paper presents the experimental results obtained by discharge experiments. In this experiment, we have used the 7 kinds of polymer insulation materials. By revealing the effect of quenching performance of polymer-based materials, we can set out an effective material for the design of the air circuit breaker. Therefore, in this investigation, we compared current and voltage waveforms, peak to peak voltage, and conductance that calculated from the measured data. In addition, appearance of the arc was observed. And we measured the rate of weight loss.