The equipment used to support and insulate wires is called an insulator. The insulator device is made of glass and is called a glass insulator. Currently, tempered glass insulators are the most widely used in circuits.
Insulators are usually made of glass and porcelain. Mainly used to fix wires on wires, etc., and to insulate the wires from the wires. Insulators are one of the key components of high-voltage transmission lines, and their performance directly affects the safety of the entire transmission line. Glass insulators are widely used because of their zero value self-destruction and easy maintenance.
In the first few years of production and operation, it was discovered that glass insulators have the following series of advantages over porcelain insulators:
Because the surface of the glass insulator has high mechanical strength, the surface is not easy to crack. The electrical strength of glass generally remains constant throughout the operation, and its aging process is much slower than porcelain. Therefore, glass insulators are mainly scrapped due to self-damage that occurred during the first year of operation, but the defects of porcelain insulators are only discovered after a few years of operation.
The use of glass insulators can eliminate the routine preventive testing of the insulators during operation. This is because all kinds of damage to the tempered glass will cause damage to the insulator, which is easy for the operator to find when patrolling the line. When the insulator is damaged, the glass fragments near the steel cover and iron feet will be stuck, and the mechanical strength of the rest of the insulator is sufficient to prevent the insulator from disconnecting. The self-breaking rate of glass insulators is one of the important indicators to measure product quality, and it is also the quality basis for bid evaluation of current transmission projects.
In terms of its own composition, the raw materials used to manufacture glass insulators are more stable than those used to manufacture electrical porcelain, which creates good conditions for stabilizing the electrical and mechanical properties of glass.
Due to the transparency of glass, it is easy to find small cracks and various internal defects and damages during visual inspection.
The electrical and mechanical properties of tempered glass are much higher than porcelain. The same type of insulator is manufactured, and its size and weight are much smaller than porcelain insulators.