Quantification of degradation in nonceramic housing materials by laser ablation

A laser irradiation technique has been explored to quantify visible as well as invisible degradation of housing materials used for nonceramic insulators. Nonceramic insulators that were removed from service and new samples of the housing that were subjected to accelerated testing in the laboratory have been evaluated. The method uses a constant power laser source for delivering the same energy to the test specimen. The proposed method is fairly quick and could be looked upon as an additional method for characterizing aging of nonceramic insulators. It has been shown that this method provides a better characterization of aging than is obtained from Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy. The housing materials evaluated include silicone rubber, ethylene propylene diene monomer rubber and cycloaliphatic epoxy resin.