Research on Lifespan Prediction of Composite Insulators in a High Altitude Area Experimental Station

In this paper, composite insulators of the same batch from Factory A, aged for 1-12 years in a high altitude area experimental station of Hunan province, were sampled. In order to investigate the changing law of lifespan prediction parameters with aging time, widely accepted testing methods, such as the static contact angle (CA) and hardness, were employed for composite insulators in accordance with previous research. Based on test results, lifespan prediction parameters were concluded and some parameters significantly correlated with aging time were filtered by means of correlation calculation. On this basis, a prediction method which can be used to determine the aging time of composite insulators was proposed based on a back propagation (BP) neural network. Test results indicate that parameters, including the static contact angle (theta(av)), the relative content of Si (X-Si) and O (X-O) elements, and salt-fog flashover voltage (U-f), have significant correlation with aging time, and that these parameters can be used to evaluate the aging degree of composite insulators. In addition, due to the high accuracy in experimental verification, the method proposed in this paper can be used to predict the aging time of composite insulators from Factory A in high altitude areas in future research.