Prediction of polymer insulating material degradation using Daubechies wavelet transformation

Economic and technical advantages have led to the increased use of polymer materials for insulators in transmission and distribution lines. Two important factors, which affect the performance of materials, are aging and loss of hydrophobicity. The conventional method to detect the changes along the material surface has been the measurement of leakage current. In this paper, a new method based on the Daubechies-4 wavelet transformation function is proposed and realized. The objective is to find a pattern that provides an early warning of the failure of polymer material. Different polymer materials were tested by the standard Inclined Plane (IP) testing method. Over a fixed interval of time, maximum and minimum values of the wavelet transform of the signal and that of the leakage current are stored for further analysis. With the obtained data, graphs are plotted and for the data obtained just before failure, distinct differences are observed to predict a failure of the polymer material.