Application Areas

Insulation Materials

Selecting the best Insulation material is essential in any application. Depending on the voltage level, it may be appropriate to choose a material with a higher thermal conductivity, mechanical strength or resistance to thermomechanical ageing. For applications at higher levels of voltage, the electrical strength of the material is increasingly important and in certain cases resistance to partial discharge degradation may be needed. Testing insulation materials before they are deployed in a product is relatively low cost and allows significant levels of statistical data to be generated.

We have carried out many projects where we have benchmarked a number of insulation types against each other to identify the best one for the application. Part of our service includes providing a technical understanding of how test results generated from smaller samples such as films / wires can be translated when applied to full-scale products (some parameters like breakdown voltage reducing as a result of increased levels of sample length / area).

Our test capabilities allow us to:

Measure the permittivity and loss angle of insulation materials over a temperature range of -45^oC to 400^oC.
Assess the insulation resistance and polarisation index over the temperature range of -45^oC to 250^oC.
Measure the partial discharge inception voltage under DC, AC and variable frequency conditions (the exact test-set-up depending on the nature of the product being supplied).
Confirm the breakdown strength of the insulation under DC, AC and variable frequency conditions.
Assess the electrical endurance of the insulation material when exposed to partial discharge generated using AC frequencies of up to 2kHz or squarewaves of up to 100kHz at elevated temperatures (10 samples can generally be tested at once).