A Quick Classifying Method for Tracking and Erosion Resistance of HTV Silicone Rubber Material via Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy

Abstract

Silicone rubber material is widely used in high-voltage external insulation systems due to its excellent hydrophobicity and hydrophobicity transfer performance. However, silicone rubber is a polymeric material with a poor ability to resist electrical tracking and erosion; therefore, some fillers must be added to the material for performance enhancement. The inclined plane test is a standard method used for evaluating the tracking and erosion resistance by subjecting the materials to a combination of voltage stress and contaminate droplets to produce failure. This test is time-consuming and difficult to apply in field inspection. In this paper, a new and faster way to evaluate the tracking and erosion resistance performance is proposed using laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS). The influence of filler content on the tracking and erosion resistance performance was studied, and the filler content was characterized by thermogravimetric analysis and the LIBS technique. In this paper, the tracking and erosion resistance of silicone rubber samples was correctly classified using principal component analysis (PCA) and neural network algorithms based on LIBS spectra. The conclusions of this work are of great significance to the performance characterization of silicone rubber composite materials.

Lens-to-sample distance effect on the quantitative analysis of steel by laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy

“…Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) has developed to be an analytical technique over the past three decades, which can determine the element composition qualitatively or quantitatively of gases, liquids, solids based on the emission from laser-induced plasma. Because of the advantages of no sample preparation, fast analysis speed, multi-element detection simultaneously, LIBS has been widely used in more and more fields, such as environmental monitoring [1,2], material analysis [3,4], process control [5,6], agriculture [7].…”

Arc Tracking Control in Insulation Systems for Aeronautic Applications: Challenges, Opportunities, and Research Needs

“…The inclined plane standard test method [39,74] is commonly used to measure erosion and tracking resistance of insulation materials during the design process but not for monitoring purposes, since it emulates the thermal degradation by electric arcing. However, it is a complex and time-consuming method, thus very difficult to perform in field inspection [76] and it has an inherent limitation since only a 4-mm gap can be applied, due to the polluted liquids dropping system defined in the standard [71].…”

“…For example, the inclined plane standard test method [74] is commonly used to measure erosion and tracking resistance of insulation materials, since it emulates the thermal degradation by electric arcing under AC supply. However, it is a complex and time-consuming method, being very difficult to perform in field inspection [76], specifically in aeronautic environments. There is also the need to develop an equivalent standard test method for DC supply [75].…”

Classification of Polluted Silicone Rubber Insulators by Using LIBS Assisted Machine Learning Techniques

“…Machine learning (ML) techniques are well-established as prominent tools for classification and prediction (regression) of various types of data. LIBS assisted with these ML techniques like support vector machine (SVM), Random Forest (RF), principal component analysis (PCA) and artificial neural network (ANN) are gaining popularity in material classification [26], [28]. Costa et al classified polymer e-waste using KNN and soft independent modeling of class analogy (SIMCA) and obtained average classification accuracies as 98 percent and 92 percent respectively [29].…”