Film thickness dependences of ac high field dissipation current waveform for low density polyethylene

Polyethylene is widely used as the insulator for power cable. To investigate the conduction mechanism for power cable insulation under ac high field, it is very important to acquire the dissipation current under actual running field. Recently, we have developed the unique system, which make possible to observe the nonlinear dissipation current waveform. In this system, to observe the nonlinear properties with high accuracy, capacitive current component is canceled by using inverse capacitive current signal instead of using the bridge circuit for canceling it. We have already reported that the dissipation currents of 40 μm thick LDPE film at 10 kV/mm and over 140 Hz, it starts to show nonlinearity and odd number´s harmonics were getting large. To investigate the conduction mechanisms in this region, especially space charge effect, various kinds of estimation, such as time variations of instantaneous resistivity for one cycle, FFT spectra of dissipation current waveforms and so on, has been examined. As the results of these estimations, it was found that the dissipation current will depend on not only the instantaneous value of electric field but also the time differential of applied electric field due to taking a balance between applied field and internal field. Furthermore, two large peaks of dissipation current for each half cycle were observed under certain condition. In this paper, to clarify the reason why it shows two peaks for each half cycle, the film thickness dependences of dissipation current waveforms were observed by using the three different thickness LDPE films.