Comparative study of high voltage bushing designs suitable for apparatus containing cryogenic helium gas

• Three types of bushings are described based on different constructional principles.
• We are addressing the need for a bushing suitable for helium gas cooled power devices.
• Keeping the surface temperature of the bushing low enables the creepage distance to be significantly reduced.

The high voltage bushing forms a critical part of any termination on cables, transformers and other power system devices. Cryogenic entities such as superconducting cables or fault current limiters add more complexity to the design of the bushing. Even more complex are bushings designed for superconducting devices which are cooled by high pressure helium gas. When looking for a bushing suitable for dielectric cable tests in a helium gas cryostat no appropriate device could be found that fulfilled the criterion regarding partial discharge inception voltage level. Therefore we decided to design and manufacture a bushing in-house. In the present work we describe the dielectric tests and operational experience on three types of bushings: One was a modified commercially available ceramics feed through which we adopted for our special need. The second bushing was made of an epoxy resin, with an embedded copper squirrel cage arrangement at the flange, extending down about 30 cm into the cold end of the bushing. This feature reduced the electric field on the surface of the bushing to a negligible value. The third bushing was based on a hollow body consisting of glass fiber reinforced polymer and stainless steel filled with liquid nitrogen. The measurements showed that the dielectric quality of all three bushings exceeded the requirements for the intended purpose. The partial discharge (PD) data from these studies will be used for the design and fabrication of a cable termination for a specialized application on board a US Navy ship.