Open Access

Partial discharges may cause damage to electrical insulation of high voltage equipment. They initiate elastic waves in the insulating material, e.g. in the stress cone of an outdoor termination. Localisation of the origin of such elastic waves can help to predict serious damaging processes in the electrical insulation. In order to measure and evaluate the wave propagation effects in typical multilayered elastomeric structures, knowledge of the material properties is required. The propagating velocity and the attenuation of longitudinal waves are important parameters. Values for these quantities found in the literature were not appropriate. Therefore, for cross-linked polyethylene (XLPE) and cured liquid silicone rubber (LSR), the longitudinal wave velocity and the attenuation were evaluated in the temperature interval from -20°C to 50°C and in the frequency range from 200 kHz to 600 kHz using a two-sample ultrasound technique. The loss factor was determined from these measured quantities. Additionally, low frequency Dynamic Mechanical Thermal Analysis (DMTA) was applied to investigate LSR and XLPE in a temperature interval between -100 and 50°C and to check qualitatively the ultrasound data.

Two different approaches to investigate the local complex conductivity and the surface charge with Scanning Force Microscopy (SFM) techniques are presented. It is shown that the measurement of local electrical properties with SFM leads to interesting information about the composition of electrically heterogeneous surfaces