Aging characteristics of polymer lightning arrester by multi-stress accelerated aging test

Recently polymer arresters are being used widely, but we don´t have appropriate long term characteristic test methods. Therefore, we need to develop a special test facility to evaluate long term reliability of polymer arresters. Its polymeric housing can be degraded by environmental stress and the interface between housing and inner module can be affected by moisture absorption. This moisture absorption can cause leakage current and tracking in the interface. We developed a multi-stress accelerated ageing test facility to simulate field conditions including UV, temperature, humidity, voltage, salt fog and rain. In addition, we carried out field exposure test at the outdoor test yard and characteristic analysis of field operated specimens to evaluate the accelerating factor of this accelerated aging test.