From: Bert Hickman
Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2002 11:07:19 -0600
Subject: [TSSP] Found an excellent (and affordable!) book
All, I just bought an excellent HARDCOVER book that covers high voltage insulation, containing a large section on the theoretical and practical aspects of gas breakdown and insulation. It impressed me so much that I wanted to share it with the other folks on the TSSP list: Arora, R., Mosch, W., High Voltage Insulation Engineering: Behavior of Dielectrics - Their Properties & Applications, New Age International Ltd., 1995 (2002 reprint). The total cost was about $25 USD. The book can be ordered via the Advanced Book Exchange (ABE) at: http://dogbert.abebooks.com The book was coauthored by a pair of EE professors to support courses in High Voltage Engineering at the Technical University in Dresden, Germany and Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, India. Printing costs were low since it was published in India. It's up to date, no nonsense, and provides much practical information... and it's also a very enjoyable and readable book! The authors have really distilled a tremendous amount of practical information into this book without going too heavily into gas theory and minutia. They provide thorough lists of references at the end of each chapter - for example, there are 94 different references listed for the chapter on gas dielectrics. The chapter on gas dielectrics is excellent, covering over 120 pages, and building upon the discussion of E-Fields for various geometries from the previous chapter. Included are uniform, weakly non-uniform, and extremely non-uniform fields, avalanche (Townsend) breakdown, partial discharges (stable glow, corona(s), Trichel pulses). This is then expanded to cover streamer corona, effects of space charge, stem and leader discharges, examples of current waveforms and discharge photos, positive and negative leader propagation (including arrested breakout for each), final jump, breakdown vs. time, polarity and waveform effects (DC, AC Lightning Impulse (LI) and Switching Impulse (SI)), and arc discharges. Gas Insulated Systems (SF6 GIS) are also covered as well as other insulating gases. Mosch provides an excellent summary table showing various electrical and physical properties for 12 different dielectric gases and vapors. The book is liberally sprinkled with pictures, charts, graphs, and illustrations. Chapters include: 1. Electrostatic Fields, Their Control and Estimation 2. Behavior of Air and Other Gaseous Dielectrics in Electric Fields 3. Electrical Properties of Vacuum as High Voltage Insulation 4. Liquid Dielectrics in High Voltage Applications 5. Solid Dielectrics and Their Behavior in Electric Fields This book would be a welcome addition for the serious researcher of gaseous breakdown phenomena. And the best part - it's in print, affordable, and significantly less expensive than soft cover books covering this area! Best regards, -- Bert -- -- Bert Hickman Stoneridge Engineering "Electromagically" (TM) Shrunken Coins! http://www.teslamania.com
Maintainer Paul Nicholson, paul@abelian.demon.co.uk.