Prediction of Pollution Characteristics of Ceramic Double-Shed Insulators Based on Dimensionless Analysis

Abstract Evaluating the accumulation of contamination on insulator surfaces plays a pivotal role in mitigating the occurrence of pollution flashover incidents. This paper takes the XWP 2 -160 porcelain double-shed insulator as the subject of study, and utilizes the COMSOL software to perform numerical simulations of the contamination accumulation characteristics. It investigates the influence of voltage, particle density, and spatial pollution concentration on contamination accumulation. Additionally, drawing upon the principles of dimensionless analysis, seven dimensionless parameters are established to comprehensively assess the contamination accumulation characteristics, and using the 1stOpt software, a functional expression representing the relationship between environmental variables and insulator contamination accumulation was obtained by fitting. The results reveal that: 1) with the voltage, particle density, and pollution concentration increase, the insulator's surface contamination level shows an increasing trend; 2) insulator contamination can be effectively characterized and predicted using seven dimensionless criteria, namely Lv , Re , Fr , N EHD , C l , C ρ , and C n ; 3) the contamination criteria correlation, fitted using power functions, achieves a coefficient of determination ( R ²) of 0.98, with an average error of 4.1% between the prediction and validation data sets.