Structure characteristics of electrical treeing in XLPE insulation under high frequencies

Electrical tree structure is one of the most important influencing factors for electrical treeing characteristics in polymers. In this paper, we focused on the structure characteristics of electrical treeing in cross-linked polyethylene (XLPE) insulation under high-frequency voltages. The tree structure characteristics include structure distribution characteristics and structure conversion characteristics. The influences of voltage, frequency, and pin-plane spacing on tree structure characteristics were analyzed based on the experimental results. It can be concluded that tree structures regularly change with the local electric field and frequency. The electric field in a very small zone near the needle tip is an important influencing factor for the formation of bush-like trees, and the lowest frequencies for the observed pure-vine-like trees increased with voltage. For double-structure trees, the local electric field at the transition location of the two structures remained almost unchanged with voltage and pin-plane spacing, but obviously increased with frequency. In order to investigate the relations of the growth rate and fractal dimension with tree structure characteristics, a new parameter, the energy threshold Wt, has been introduced and calculated for different tree structures.