MODELING AC ARC RE-IGNITION CONDITIONS ON ICE -COVERED INSULATORS USING ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORKS
The propagation of local arcs are necessary for a flashover to occur on an ice-covered insulator. It was supposed that the local AC arc extended when it satisfied the arc re-ignition conditions. In this paper an attempt has been made to model Va = f ( I , L , x ) for estimating the arc re-ignition conditions as function of leakage current and insulator length using multi-layer feed-forward neural network with back propagation technique. Once trained with experimental results taken from the CIGELE model , the proposed ANN model is then capable of predicting arc maintenance voltage , under any given set of leakage current and insulator length. With the use of the optimized ANN parameters , a prediction accuracy with a %MAE of 2.85% was achieved.
Critical conditions of AC arc propagation on ice surfaces
The critical condition of AC are propagation on ice surfaces was investigated and the arc maintenance condition was determined. It was found that the local are established along the air gap could enlarge as the air gaps enlarge with ice melting and falling down. When the critical length of local are along the air gap was obtained, it propagated on the ice-surface until the flashover occurred. It was also found that the arc maintenance condition depends on the ice sample length. The results obtained allowed to improve our previous model, developed for predicting the critical flashover voltage of ice-covered insulators.
The micro-mechanical behaviour of artificially cemented sand particles under compression and shear
The mechanical behaviour of cemented sands at macro-scale has been widely studied in the past, while there is still a lack of laboratory test data for the micro-mechanical response. Therefore, a series of uniaxial compression and tangential shear tests on artificially cemented sand particles have been conducted using a microscope to observe their behaviour. First, the consistency of cemented particles with different cementing agents is discussed. Three breakage modes are proposed according to the images taken using a microscope camera. A new parameter named ‘local roundness at contact’ is introduced to emphasise the effect of contact morphology on sample strength. Moreover, the effect of bond thickness on the mechanical response of cemented particles has been investigated. Finally, the shear strength parameters of artificially cemented sand samples have been determined for two different sample diameters.