3D model of a droplet in an electric field Original Research Article

Outdoor high-voltage equipment is exposed to rain and moisture. Water droplets on the surface of insulators influence negatively the insulating and hydrophobic material properties. The shape of the droplets signifies the state of the aging material. The present paper develops a numerical procedure to determine the three-dimensional shape of water droplets in strong electric fields. That includes the solution of a feed-back problem between the droplet shape and the electric field. Here we concentrate on the particular features in three dimensions and compare the resulting droplet shapes with a 2D droplet model.