A Surface Discharge Model for the Design of Surface Components of Insulation Systems Under AC Stress in Industrial Electronics Environments

Industrial electronics is trending toward higher levels of voltage supply and specific power, with a broad diversity of applications. Adequate criteria for the design of insulation systems, subjected to types and extent of stresses noncomparable with conventional low voltage, frequency, and temperature design practice, need to be developed. Therefore, modeling the most significant mechanisms that can cause design failure in providing the specified reliability is sought after. Since one of the most harmful mechanisms for accelerated aging is partial discharges, this article focuses of achieving a generalization of a well-known, approximate partial discharge inception model, proposed by Niemeyer, to calculate the partial discharge inception voltage of an insulation system for surface discharges that may have a significant impact on components used in industrial electronics environments. The validation of the proposed model is performed on simple test objects.