Evaluation of Naturally Polluted Insulators Removed From Transmission Lines

Darcy Ramalho de Mello, and Ricardo Wesley S. Garcia

Federal Institute of Education, Brazil

Abstract: This paper intends to present the suggestions and conclusions of the study carried out by a Cigré Working Group D1.44 with the objective of providing guidelines to test naturally polluted insulators, considering methods and past experiences in the evaluation of the performance of insulators removed from natural environmental conditions and new technologies still in development, implementation and commercialization. Among these guidelines are the application of test methods developed in the 1980s and which are once again of interest, with the possibility of being standardized by the IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission), and the industrialization of specific instruments, which showed good performance but are still in the prototype phase. These guidelines have the primary purpose of allowing electric utilities to exchange experiences, obtained with the same methodology, and thus improve the reliability of transmission lines.