Abnormal Time-Domain Current Spectrum of Inorganic Insulating Powder under DC Voltage

Abstract

The total current of dielectrics under DC voltage consists of relaxation current and conduction current, which contains the information about the relaxation polarization and conduction. The time-domain spectrum (TDS) is an effective method to study the dielectric properties of insulating dielectrics. In this paper, the TDS method is also used to study the dielectric properties of the compressed inorganic hexagonal boron nitride (BN) and magnesium oxide (MgO) insulating powders. It is interestingly found that these inorganic insulating powders shows an abnormal TDS, where the current decreases monotonically to a certain level at first and then increases with time while in normal TDS the current decreases monotonically with time and finally reaches a steady value which is conduction current. The experiments verify that the abnormal phenomenon is attributed to the moisture absorption of powders during the testing process, which causes an increase in conductivity and leads to the increasing current at the end of testing time. The insulating powder cannot be regarded as a time-invariant system during the measurement, and the time-varying characteristic is mainly manifested in conduction. A time-domain least squares fitting method is presented and is effective to eliminate the deviation from normal TDS. The results of this paper provide a reference for dealing with abnormal TDS.