Dimensional analysis for contamination severity assessment on high voltage insulators

The environmental pollution which is mainly affected by the weather conditions are the main cause of flashovers on high voltage insulators leading to outages in power systems. It is generally recognized that the worst type of pollution that lead to the contamination flashovers is marine pollution as found in the immediate neighborhood of the coastal regions followed by solid pollution as found in the dense industrial areas. This research is directed towards the study of contamination of insulator under marine pollution. The effects of various meteorological factors on the pollution severity have been investigated thoroughly. The mathematical relations between equivalent salt deposit density (ESDD) with refer to meteorological conditions such as wind speed, rainfall and surface conductivity has been derived using Dimensional Analysis. It has been proved that the Dimensional Analysis technique is suitable for the contamination studies and assessment on the insulators. The predicted ESDD has been compared with the measured for a practical system.