Electrical treeing performance of silicone rubber filled with plasma-treated nanoparticles

Nanocomposites have gained wide interests as insulating materials due to their excellent ability to resist electrical discharges such as corona discharges, partial discharges, electrical treeing and water treeing. However, surface incompatibility between polymer and nanoparticles is one of the main...

Full description

Saved in:

Bibliographic Details
Main Author:	Musa, Fatin Nabilah
Format:	Thesis
Language:	English
Published:	2016
Subjects:	TK Electrical engineering Electronics Nuclear engineering
Online Access:	http://eprints.utm.my/id/eprint/60064/1/FatinNabilahMusaMFKE2016.pdf
Tags:	Add Tag No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!

id	my-utm-ep.60064
record_format	uketd_dc
spelling	my-utm-ep.600642020-11-19T07:06:16Z Electrical treeing performance of silicone rubber filled with plasma-treated nanoparticles 2016-08 Musa, Fatin Nabilah TK Electrical engineering. Electronics Nuclear engineering Nanocomposites have gained wide interests as insulating materials due to their excellent ability to resist electrical discharges such as corona discharges, partial discharges, electrical treeing and water treeing. However, surface incompatibility between polymer and nanoparticles is one of the main issues that may reduce their performances towards discharge resistances. Processing techniques of these nanoparticles such as coupling agent and intercalation methods showed excellent performance, but those techniques involved chemical processes. Recently, plasma treatment was introduced as an improved technique to enhance the dispersion of nanocomposites in electrical applications. However, electrical treeing studies on the electrical performance of plasma-treated nanocomposites are lacking. This study presents an investigation on the electrical tree growth performance as well as the effect of nanoparticles concentration of silicone rubber (SiR) filled with silicon dioxide (SiO2) nanoparticles treated with Atmospheric Pressure Plasma (APP). The treatment of the SiO2 nanoparticles’ surfaces with APP is to enhance SiO2 compatibility with SiR matrix. Besides, untreated and silane-treated nanocomposites were also studied for comparison purpose. Constant AC voltage was applied to these untreated, silane and plasma-treated nanocomposites with different nanoparticles concentration of 1, 3 and 5 wt% to investigate their electrical performances i.e. tree initiation time, tree propagation time, growth rate and tree breakdown time. Morphological analysis as well as chemical characterization of the nanoparticles were analyzed using Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscope (FESEM), Energy Dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX) and X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS) while, the dispersion of the nanoparticles-polymer matrix were analyzed using FESEM. Results show that plasma-treated SiO2 nanoparticles dispersed uniformly in the SiR polymer matrix. The plasma-treated nanocomposites were able to resist electrical treeing better than untreated and silane-treated nanocomposites. The increase in nanoparticles concentration in all three different treatments has enhanced the electrical tree performance of the nanocomposites. Overall, the result from this study reveals that the plasma-treated nanocomposites showed better efficacy in inhibiting electrical tree growth by as much as 64% as compared to silane-treated nanocomposites that showed an efficacy in electrical tree growth rate reduction by as much as 29%. This indicates that plasma treatment could be an alternative technique to improve surface incompatibility of nanocomposites, and hence, resisting electrical treeing growth. 2016-08 Thesis http://eprints.utm.my/id/eprint/60064/ http://eprints.utm.my/id/eprint/60064/1/FatinNabilahMusaMFKE2016.pdf application/pdf en public http://dms.library.utm.my:8080/vital/access/manager/Repository/vital:93783 masters Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Faculty of Electrical Engineering Faculty of Electrical Engineering
institution	Universiti Teknologi Malaysia
collection	UTM Institutional Repository
language	English
topic	TK Electrical engineering Electronics Nuclear engineering
spellingShingle	TK Electrical engineering Electronics Nuclear engineering Musa, Fatin Nabilah Electrical treeing performance of silicone rubber filled with plasma-treated nanoparticles
description	Nanocomposites have gained wide interests as insulating materials due to their excellent ability to resist electrical discharges such as corona discharges, partial discharges, electrical treeing and water treeing. However, surface incompatibility between polymer and nanoparticles is one of the main issues that may reduce their performances towards discharge resistances. Processing techniques of these nanoparticles such as coupling agent and intercalation methods showed excellent performance, but those techniques involved chemical processes. Recently, plasma treatment was introduced as an improved technique to enhance the dispersion of nanocomposites in electrical applications. However, electrical treeing studies on the electrical performance of plasma-treated nanocomposites are lacking. This study presents an investigation on the electrical tree growth performance as well as the effect of nanoparticles concentration of silicone rubber (SiR) filled with silicon dioxide (SiO2) nanoparticles treated with Atmospheric Pressure Plasma (APP). The treatment of the SiO2 nanoparticles’ surfaces with APP is to enhance SiO2 compatibility with SiR matrix. Besides, untreated and silane-treated nanocomposites were also studied for comparison purpose. Constant AC voltage was applied to these untreated, silane and plasma-treated nanocomposites with different nanoparticles concentration of 1, 3 and 5 wt% to investigate their electrical performances i.e. tree initiation time, tree propagation time, growth rate and tree breakdown time. Morphological analysis as well as chemical characterization of the nanoparticles were analyzed using Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscope (FESEM), Energy Dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX) and X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS) while, the dispersion of the nanoparticles-polymer matrix were analyzed using FESEM. Results show that plasma-treated SiO2 nanoparticles dispersed uniformly in the SiR polymer matrix. The plasma-treated nanocomposites were able to resist electrical treeing better than untreated and silane-treated nanocomposites. The increase in nanoparticles concentration in all three different treatments has enhanced the electrical tree performance of the nanocomposites. Overall, the result from this study reveals that the plasma-treated nanocomposites showed better efficacy in inhibiting electrical tree growth by as much as 64% as compared to silane-treated nanocomposites that showed an efficacy in electrical tree growth rate reduction by as much as 29%. This indicates that plasma treatment could be an alternative technique to improve surface incompatibility of nanocomposites, and hence, resisting electrical treeing growth.
format	Thesis
qualification_level	Master's degree
author	Musa, Fatin Nabilah
author_facet	Musa, Fatin Nabilah
author_sort	Musa, Fatin Nabilah
title	Electrical treeing performance of silicone rubber filled with plasma-treated nanoparticles
title_short	Electrical treeing performance of silicone rubber filled with plasma-treated nanoparticles
title_full	Electrical treeing performance of silicone rubber filled with plasma-treated nanoparticles
title_fullStr	Electrical treeing performance of silicone rubber filled with plasma-treated nanoparticles
title_full_unstemmed	Electrical treeing performance of silicone rubber filled with plasma-treated nanoparticles
title_sort	electrical treeing performance of silicone rubber filled with plasma-treated nanoparticles
granting_institution	Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Faculty of Electrical Engineering
granting_department	Faculty of Electrical Engineering
publishDate	2016
url	http://eprints.utm.my/id/eprint/60064/1/FatinNabilahMusaMFKE2016.pdf
_version_	1747817754282426368

Electrical treeing performance of silicone rubber filled with plasma-treated nanoparticles

Similar Items