Improvement of Flashover Voltage of Epoxy Resin by Large-Area Dielectric Barrier Discharge

Insulation materials are widely used in various fields such as high voltage insulation, power electronics and aerospace. However, as the voltage level increases and the application area expands, the surface of the insulation material will have the phenomenon of flashover along the surface, which will lead to the aging of the insulation and thus reduce the stability of the power system. The current methods to enhance the flashover voltage along the surface of insulating materials generally have the disadvantages of high cost and environmental pollution. However, most of the existing plasma-modified devices focus on small-area materials. In this paper, we proposed a dielectric barrier discharge device for large-area insulating materials, which uses a water-net electrode structure to solve the problem of large-area discharge uniformity while limiting the temperature rise of the electrode so that it can operate stably for a long time. A 30 cm × 40 cm epoxy resin plate is used as the target, and the surface modification of the designed electrode is used to enhance the flashover voltage along the surface. The results show that the surface of the sample modified by the device with water repellent deposited a silica-like film, which increased the surface conductivity by an order of magnitude and increased the flashover voltage uniformly from 8.4 to 9.2 kV. The results of this paper are a guide to the deposition of thin films on large-area flat materials by DBD.