Nanostructured Zro2 as an Anti Contamination Coating for Hv Insulator – an Experimental Analysis

Porcelain electric insulators act as a primary supp ort device for transmission lines. Being installed i n the outer atmosphere these can exhibit flashover due to expos iting to pollutant environments such as industrial reas, deserts and sea air, containing carbon, sand and salt. There ha s to be a new innovative method to mitigate the abov e problem and one such problem is coating these insulators with the na nostructured thin film. The present investigation a ims to develop and characterize dielectric and hydrophobic zirconium o xide thin films, deposited on porcelain insulators surfaces, using a direct current (DC) magnetron sputtering. A zirconium target with 99.999% purity was used as precursor and argon gas with 99.999% purity was employed. Oxygen was used as a reactive gas. Sputtering power (30, 40, 50 and 60W ) has been varied in order to investigate the optical and hydr ophobic property. Optical and hydrophobic property was performed using UV-Nis-NIR spectrophotometer and contact angle goniometer (CAG), respectively. Surface roughness was also calculated using atomic force microscopy (AFM). Maxim u contact angle was found to be 108.2 0 which show that the film was hydrophobic in nature. Dielectric constant shows an increasing trend up to 60W power. It attain s a maximum value of ~24.6 at 60W power which is very close to th e bulk value.