19th International Symposium on High Voltage Engineering (ISH 2015)

Pilsen hosted the 19th International Symposium on High Voltage Engineering from 23 to 28 August 2015, on the campus of the University of West Bohemia. ISH is a standing meeting place for engineers who design, test and maintain high-voltage equipment, and the 2015 edition came less than a year after the BEST PATHS project had started work at the end of 2014.

The programme ran along six themes: electromagnetic fields and their measurement, transient voltages from lightning and switching, high-voltage and high-current testing, advanced materials and insulation systems, diagnostics and monitoring (partial discharges among them), and HVDC technologies and applications.

For the project, the week mattered because of two accepted papers. Both came out of its research on compact overhead lines, and both were presented by Igor Gutman of STRI, the Swedish testing laboratory, who wrote them with STRI colleagues and Jean-François Goffinet of the Belgian grid operator Elia:

• “Application of New Test Procedure for Verification of Water Drop Corona on Innovative Insulated Cross-Arms”
• “Application of New Pollution Test Method to Provide Basic Data of Flashover Performance of Composite Insulated Cross-Arms”

The first described a test method devised at STRI to check that composite insulators do not degrade through water-induced corona in relatively clean air. The second gave the first pollution and corona results for the compact insulation systems.

Early results, then. They were still the first published output of a line of work that ran for three more years.

That work belongs to Demo 4 on repowering AC corridors, whose test plan put the insulated cross-arms through tracking and erosion trials lasting 5,000 hours; by 2018 one design had been installed on a new Elia overhead line in Belgium, as reported at the Budapest workshop.