Laboratory testing and implementation of an insulator pollution monitor based on the Peltier cooling principle

The pollution severity of a location needs to be known before high-voltage outdoor insulation can be correctly dimensioned or maintenance programmes, such as insulator washing, effectively implemented. There are a number of methods used to do this, one of them being the measurement of surface conductance (and hence conductivity) of a polluted surface. The instrument described in this paper is a pollution severity monitor based on measuring the electrical conductivity of an artificially cooled polluted glass surface. cooling is achieved by using a thermoelectric cooler. The entire process, which includes data logging, is controlled by a microcontroller. The design of the instrument and preliminary laboratory measurements are presented