| Abstract: | Until recently, SF6 gas has widely been used as the best insulating medium in substation equipment. However, SF6 gas was specified to be a greenhouse gas at COP3 in 1997 because of its high global warming potential (GWP), and alternative insulation gases to SF6 have been sought for a long time. Alternatives using the natural gases are considered to be suitable, but none of them show better properties for insulation as well as good environmental compatibility. Therefore, it is necessary to rationalize the equipment insulation level and reduce the test voltage of electric power apparatus to as low a level as possible. The actual lightning surge waveform (so‐called nonstandard lightning impulse waveform) occurring in the actual field is different from the standard lightning impulse waveform (1.2/50 μs). There are many cases in which the actual lightning surge waveform has a steep rise and large decay of overvoltage, and the insulation requirements are not as severe as those for the standard lightning impulse waveform. In this paper, we focused our research on N2 gas as an SF6 substitute and investigated the insulation characteristics of N2 gas for a single‐frequency oscillatory waveform with various frequencies from 2.7 to 20.0 MHz and damping ratios. Based on the experimental results, it might be possible to reduce the test voltage of N2 gas insulation by evaluating the crest value of the actual lightning surge waveform that has been converted into an equivalent standard lightning impulse waveform. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electr Eng Jpn, 167(2): 10–20, 2009; Published online in Wiley InterScience ( www.interscience.wiley.com ). DOI 10.1002/eej.20754 |
