Space charge phenomena in oil-paper insulation materials under high voltage direct current

The wide use of high voltage direct current (HVDC) equipments, such as convert transformer, DC bushing, DC cables, makes the research of oil-paper material insulation extraordinarily important. The space charge effect is the key insulation problem of HVDC equipments. This paper studied the space charge characteristics of oil-paper insulation materials by Pulsed Electro-Acoustic (PEA) method. In this paper, we studied and discussed the relationship between space charge and breakdown in oil-paper. The results show that the space charge comes from ionization at lower field intensity. When the stress is getting higher, injection of homo carriers occurs first at cathode and later at anode. The space charge inside oil-paper sample results in an electrical field distortion up to 40%. The conductivity of oil-paper insulation material is much larger than that of polyethylene, so the space charge dissipates fast when depolarized. The fast dissipation of space charge will play a key role of oil-paper insulating performance in condition of polarity reversal under HVDC. When the applied negative electrical field rose to between 50 kV/mm and 57 kV/mm, the oil-paper material got breakdown in a short time. During this process, an obvious movement of space charge was observed.