Open Access

ARTICLE

Simulation of Electric Field Distribution along Insulator Surface in Polluted Environments

by Yukun Lv, Yuechi Wang^*, Jiawen Wang, Jing Wang, Jiaxi Yang

Department of Energy, Power and Mechanical Engineering, North China Electric Power University, Baoding, 071003, China

* Corresponding Author: Yuechi Wang. Email:

Energy Engineering 2021, 118(3), 631-642. https://doi.org/10.32604/EE.2021.014578

Received 10 October 2020; Accepted 28 December 2020; Issue published 22 March 2021

Abstract

In recent years, more than 50% of the cities in the inland area of our country have suffered from moderate pollution. It can affect the distribution of electric field along the surface of insulator and the pollution characteristics of its surface area, even endanger the safe operation of transmission lines. This paper takes the XSP-160 porcelain three umbrella insulator under the action of 0–±30 kV DC voltage as the research object, and establishes the physical model of the insulator; uses COMSOL software to simulate the electric field of the insulator. The comparison with the results of the wind tunnel test of North China Electric Power University verifies the rationality of the simulation method. In view of the medium pollution environment which often occurs in the inland area, the force of the polluted particles deposited on the insulator under 110 kV DC voltage was analyzed. The distribution characteristics of the electric field along the surface in the clean and three kinds of pollution environment (light, medium and heavy) were simulated and compared. The results showed that: 1) In the moderate pollution environment, the influence of fluid drag force on the movement of polluted particles is greater at the initial stage (0.28–0.33 s); at the late stage (after 0.33 s), the influence of the electric field force begins to increase, and gradually plays a major role in the process of fouling. 2) In the three different polluted environments, the potential along the surface of each umbrella skirt of the insulator increases non-linearly with the increasing of the pollution concentration, and there are apparent potential inflection points near b and l. 3) The pollution particle concentration has the most obvious influence on the electric field along the low-voltage umbrella skirt, whose potential distortion rate can be up to 220 times in the heavy polluted environment.

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