Conductivity measurement of plaque samples obtained from the insulation of high voltage extruded cables

Abstract

Good understanding of insulation conductivity is of great importance in development and design of high voltage DC cables. Conductivity of polymeric insulation materials is a property which is quite sensitive to many parameters such as temperature, electric field, chemical composition, thermal history, morphology, etc. Therefore, due to different process history, the results obtained from pressed plaques are not necessarily representative of the insulation behavior in an extruded cable. A method was developed to obtain samples from HV cable in form of plaques with a thicknesses up to a few millimeters. Plaque samples were extracted from two cables, their conductivity at high field was measured and compared to those obtained from fullscale tests; the results, confirm a very good agreement between the small scale and full-scale measurements; this hints to a promising prospect for such small scale characterization techniques.