Environmental stress of electrical machine winding insulation

Sammanfattning: The conducting winding of an electrical machine is insulated in order to prevent any short circuits to occur within the machine. This insulation is during its lifetime exposed to several environmental stresses and therefore plays an important role in the life length of the machine. Accelerated stress tests are used to investigate what design and material is most suitable for a good endurance of a product. In this master thesis, new accelerated test methods for the insulation system in an electrical machine are developed and evaluated. The study resulted in four stress tests that simulate the thermal stress, the thermomechanical stress and the ambient stress from direct oil cooling. Three diagnosis tests and a material analysis were used in order to evaluate how these accelerated stress test methods affected the insulation. The diagnosis tests showed no clear sign of deterioration of the insulation in terms of change in electrical characteristics. However, the material analysis indicated deterioration of the insulation, such as cracks and oxidation of the material. These changes show that the test methods are capable to affect the insulation, but will need more time to cause a breakdown, since a stator of this kind is expected to have a very long life length. Therefore, in future work on this topic, these test methods should continue for a longer time and it would likely be interesting to look into other diagnosis tests.