Abstract
Salt deposited on the surface of insulators used in electric power systems causes flash-over accidents. Therefore, the quantity of salt on insulators should be monitored not to exceed a cri-tical value. We propose a new remote sensing technique to measure the quantity of salt on in-sulators of power systems. A pulsed laser beam is focused on an insulator to dissociate the salt to sodium atoms. The amount of the salt is measured from the intensity of the spontaneous emis-sion from the sodium atoms. A compact salt-meter was developed with a Nd: YAG laser, and the sensitivity, detection range, required laser fluence, and others were investigated. The signal intensity for a detection range of 10m was measured and compared with the data measured by a conventional conductivity method.
