In spite of 50 years of research and development the gap between intrinsic breakdown of insulating polymeric materials and engineering breakdown is still large. In the early time of development of polymeric insulation, engineering fields were limited by the presence of molecular/atomic impurities and defects in the form of voids and contaminants. The former leads to high losses/conductivity with the inevitable thermal runaway when increasing the electric field. The latter is the origin of internal discharges and local field concentration both giving rise to material degradation under the form of electrical treeing. Progress in purification methods, material processing and engineering concepts allow increasing the engineering field where the electronic component of the current shown up. The electrical engineering community is now facing the challenge of pushing the limit further. This needs a better description and control of the electronic transport which is responsible for ageing (degradation of the material properties with time under stress) and breakdown. To do so, approaches must rely on material sciences with the objective to tailor the electronic properties of the polymer through chemical/physical modification aiming at controlling specific chemical functions and at tuning the microstructure. Computation at the quantum mechanical level is of paramount importance to achieve this goal. This must be coupled to an improved description of the physics of charge transport, energy storage and transfer dynamics which are the essential ingredients involved in material ageing and in breakdown. Modeling transport and ageing should be done based on reasonable physical grounds but giving outputs tractable in more macroscopic models directly comparable with experimental data. Our objective in this conference is to give an overview of what has been realized along this approach on polyethylene-based materials for HVDC applications and to discuss the challenge for implementing a similar scheme for thin-films capacitors.

Challenges in high field polymeric insulation for electrical engineering applications

246th National Meeting (2013)

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.