Abstract
Insulators in coastal substations are polluted due to the salty wind blowing from the sea. The insulator pollution may cause higher leakage current and ultimately give rise to blackouts due to flash-over. To avoid those accidents, the insulators are frequently washed using much amount of pure water. Almost all measuring devices use a pilot insulator, which is exposed to the same conditions as the actual insulators, and measure the pollution deposits on the pilot insulator at each measurement interval. However, when measuring the pilot insulator (15 minutes), the pilot insulator is not being exposed. Therefore the larger the times of measuring, the more errors will be resulted. This research aims at developing a method of reliable decision making of timing for measuring and washing of the polluted insulators. The proposed method is derived based on the prediction of pollution deposits by use of the insulator pollution model. Effectiveness of the proposed method was demonstrated by applying it to actual data taken from Karatsu substation in Japan.
