Hydrophobic and Hydrophilic Insulator Surface Verification via Reforming Time Measurement with Centroid Tracking Technique

The power system's stability must not be affected by power failures caused by surface insulator degradation, which produces a flashover decrease in the insulation's efficiency due to a change in the hydrophobicity class (HC). In this research, we concentrate on the reforming time that will be classified the HC based on IEC TS 62073, especially the surface tension method. We contribute the traditional method from manual to the automatic image processing method. The Centroid Tracking Segmentation in a Wet Area (CTSWA) is the key technique. The comparative timing between the manually adjacent frames checked which is called the ground truth (GT) and our method (CTSWA) was shown. The percentage of difference reforming time was verified. Most of the results have below 3% of difference reforming time. This benefit can reduce the limitation of human decisions.