Insulation performance of vacuum interrupter after high frequency voltage impulses conditioning

The conditioning is widely used to enhance the insulation performance of vacuum interrupter, such as current conditioning and spark conditioning. In this paper, we compared the conditioning performance between traditional ones and high frequency voltage impulses conditioning method with their conditioning parameters, such as conditioning voltage, current and times. Positive polarity lightning impulse voltage (1.2/50μs) was applied by an up-and-down method to test the conditioning insulation performance. The experiment results showed that, after high frequency voltage impulses conditioning, insulation strength of vacuum interrupter increased by nearly 16%. In addition, the melt layer on contact surface is well-distributed.