The Application of Novel Polypropylene to the Insulation of Electric Power Cable (3)

Abstract

Having higher melting temperature than polyethylene, polypropylene has been expected as insulation material for power cable. But isotactic polypropylene used generally is unsuitable as cable insulation because it shows poor flexibility, low breakdown strength due to growing spherulites, and so on. But stereoregular syndiotactic polypropylene (s-PP) newly developed with metallocene catalyst shows quite different properties from i-PP. The authors had investigated the basic properties of s-PP and the initial properties as a cable which was manufactured using s-PP insulation, in the previous paper. As the results of this, it was revealed that s-PP had superior thermal and electrical properties to cross-linked polyethylene and the s-PP insulation cable showed satisfactory initial properties. However, in order to apply to an actual cable, the properties must be maintainable over 30 years after construction. In this paper, we estimated the long term and remaining properties for s-PP insulation cable. A series of experiments on long term properties gave following results. (1) S-PP cable shows longer life over 30 years. (2) The breakdown strength of s-PP cable after long term experiment equal to 30 years is slightly lower than initial breakdown strength, but it's sufficient as remaining property. Furthermore, water-tree resistivity of s-PP was investigated and it was revealed that s-PP significantly suppressed the water tree propagation compared with XLPE. These results suggested that s-PP cable would be available as next generation cable. © 2004, The Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. All rights reserved.