Degradation Characteristics of O-rings on Highly Aged GIS

Abstract

Owing to increasing number of highly aged GIS, the investigation of the remaining lifetimes of those systems are becoming more important. Because a lot of O-rings are used in GIS, the study of degradation mechanism and lifetime estimation method of O-ring is essential. In this paper, the information about O-ring degradation mechanism is described, and the statistical method for estimating the remaining lifetime of O-ring is proposed. The degradation of O-ring is mainly subject to chemical reactions triggered by oxygen. Because there are many factors influencing those chemical reactions, the dispersion of degradation rates of O-rings in GIS is very large. Consequently the statistical analysis is one of the effective techniques for lifetime estimation of O-rings in GIS.