Novel Machine Insulation Material for Transportation Electrification Applications

Polyimide (Kapton
^®
) is considered as an excellent insulation material for form-wound inverter-fed machines finding applications in all-electric ships, more-electric aircraft, and electric vehicles. Large voltage transients from inverters have been a major cause of premature insulation failure in inverter-fed motors and compromise the safety and reliability of the electrified transportation. In this paper, we propose a novel nanostructured insulation material coated on Kapton
^®
. This novel nano-composite-coated Kapton
^®
is shown to have twice the lifetime of standard Kapton
^®
under medium-voltage PWM accelerated aging tests. Details of the material and the experimental setup used to test the insulation samples are presented in the paper.