Effect of contamination layer thickness
The selected sample insulator simulation section of Fig. 1c was subjected to the boundary conditions, where the potentials on the two ends of the sample sector – as acquired from the global analysis – were 54.196 kV and 49.828 kV.
Based on the statistical distributions of sand grain sizes in Sinai – reported in an earlier study [10] – sand grains with diameters in the range of 1–2 mm prevailed. Therefore, this study takes this range of grain sizes and assumes that enough accumulation creates a contamination layer of an equal thickness. Furthermore, chemical analysis carried out on acquired samples determined the equivalent salt content (ESC, in mg of salt/g of sand) of the pollution layer. It was observed that a range of salinity of 0.5–1.5 mg salt/g sand was the most likely to exist in Sinai.
To convert the salt content expressed in ESC (mg of salt/g of sand) – as produced by the chemical analysis – into pollution layer electrical conductivity (S/m), the solution salinity is first obtained from the expression [11]:
equation(1)
Sa=10-3×ESC×QSa=10-3×ESC×Q
Sa is the salinity of the solution. Q is the amount of sand deposited on insulator surface with a certain amount of water.
Layer salinity is then related to electrical conductivity of such solution is determined [12]:
equation(2)
Sa=(5.7×σ20)1.03
σ20 is the conductivity at a temperature of 20 °C in (S/m).
Using the theories of lattice geometry, the quantity Q can be expressed as:
equation(3)
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where λ is the lattice arrangement density, which is the proportion of the actual amount of particles (sand) that occupies a given space; ρ is the specific gravity of wet sand (1.92 g/ml).
The parameter λ was calculated to fall in the range from 0.523 to 0.740 depending on the level of compactness [11]. The former value is much more realistic since sand will deposit of the insulator surface in a rather loose fashion and it is, therefore, not likely to deposit in an orderly space-optimized manner. The lattice arrangement density λ, in this work, is thus chosen as 0.523.
The above values give a realistic Q value = 2.1 g/ml.
The above relations were applied over the reported range of ESC to obtain the corresponding electrical conductivity. Table 2 shows the different conductivity of sand grain collected from Sinai desert according to its ESC range using the value Q = 2.1 g/ml.
These values were readily used in polluted insulator simulation in seeking the statistics of tangential electric field along composite insulator, which drives the leakage current. The effects of those conductivities in each contamination layer on the leakage current density on insulator surface were sought.
As an example, Fig. 2a shows the leakage current density distribution over the creepage distance for a 1 mm contaminating layer thickness and with 284.9 μS/cm contaminant conductivity. By surface integrating current densities, the overall surface leakage current was found to be 54.6 mA.
Fig. 2b, Fig. 2c and Fig. 2d depict the effects on the surface distribution of leakage current density of different conductivities in a 1, 1.5, and 2 mm contamination layers, respectively. Surface integration was numerically performed to produce the surface leakage currents in the above cases. The results are summarized in Table 3.