Informatics Publishing Limited

Vynatheya S ¹, Suryanarayana K ², Shekhar Kumar M ³, Santhosh Kumar B L ⁴, Bheema Raju V ⁵

Affiliations
1 Joint Director, Materials Technology Division, Central Power Research Institue, Bangalore-560080, IN
2 Engineering Officer, Earthquake Engineering & vibration Research Center, Central Power Research Institue, Bangalore-560080, IN
3 Additional Director, Materials Technology Division, Central Power Research Institue, Bangalore-560080, IN
4 Scientist,Laird Technologies, Bangalore-560048, IN
5 Professor, Department of Chemistry, Dayananda Sagar College of Engineering, Bangalore-560 078, IN

Abstract

Although porcelain insulators in power lines have been in use for decades, several undergo catastrophic failures while early in service. A study addressing the materials aspects has been conducted on alumina based porcelain insulators. Apart from their electro mechanical stability characteristics, material aspects like composition, phase and microstructure play a very important role in their performance. The qualitative phase analyses on the insulator samples give an idea about the different major and minor phases present. Attempts have already been made to estimate α alumina and α quartz content in porcelain body. Mullite is another important phase present in the porcelain body, which gets formed during firing of raw materials during insulator manufacture and which has not been estimated quantitatively. An attempt has been made here to assess the mullite content in the alumina based insulator samples by X-Ray diffraction quantitative analysis. Internal standard method of quantification has been adopted successfully for the analysis. This article describes the quantification of mullite phase by the internal standard method based on X-Ray diffraction principle.

Keywords

Porcelain Insulator, Mullite, Internal Standard, Titanium Oxide

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