CHAPTER 2

LITERATURE SURVEY

2.1. Introduction

Reliable power transmission is a main factor in designing transmission and

distribution lines. Contaminated environments significantly reduce the performance of
outdoor insulators in which the accumulation of contamination eventually leads to a
complete flashover. The main factors that lead to contamination flashover include,
operating voltage, humidity level and temperature. Flashover also occurs when even a
bio-degradable contaminants like Algae gets deposited over the surface of the insulator
and helps to decrease the surface resistance so that the leakage current gets increased.

2.2. Leakage Current Prediction

The leakage current has been used to study the aging state of outdoor insulators.
In particular the leakage current harmonics were found to correlate with dry-band
arcing and hence with erosion and tracking. In addition, the leakage current low
harmonics were found to correlate with some weathering conditions, like humidity
levels, and ultraviolet radiations. The saturation level of leakage current during the early
aging period was predicted for polymer insulators. In this study the experiment was
performed for 100 hours and the saturation level for LC was recorded and predicted
using neural networks. The features used in this study included the initial leakage
current value and the rate of change of leakage current for the first 5 hours of the
experiment. The accuracy for this experiment was 95 % when the training and testing
was done on the same insulator rating. When the training and testing was done on
insulators with different ratings, the accuracy was 81%.

2.3. Thesis Contribution

Previous researches have been conducted to find the effect of algae over the
polymeric insulators. From the previous studies we came to a knowledge that the effect
of Algae over the surface of conductor has no major effect. The Algae (Alga Chlorella
vulgaris) is an algae with unicellular alga with spherical shape and greenish pigment
widely found around the world. This algae gets deposited over the surface of the

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