Breakdown strength measurements on cylindrical polyvinyl chloride sheaths under AC and DC voltages

In this work, we study the effect of the applied voltage form and its rise speed on breakdown voltage of polyvinyl chloride sheaths. We first present the statistical model of Weibull used for processing the results, then we describe the experimental devices. We finally study the evolution of the nominal breakdown voltage with 8 different rise ramps up to 4.75 kV.s^-1 and under different forms (AC 50 Hz, positive and negative DC voltage). A population of 50 samples has been used for calculating the mean breakdown field at each profile voltage.