Ablation characteristics of the different kinds of polymer insulators

An insulator in a quenching chamber of a switch causes ablation, and releases gases when arcing. These released gases are known to have an influence on the arc characteristics. In this paper, experiments with the eight kinds of insulators and air will be introduced. The experiments were done by observing the arc shapes changes with digital high-speed video cameras. Furthermore, we measured arc conductance from the quenching peak to current zero by measuring arc voltage and current. The shapes of the arc were observed from two directions.