Research on flashover voltage of nylon in SF6 under high-voltage pulse

Abstract Flashover on the surface of dielectric failure in compact accelerators can cause equipment to malfunction and threaten personal safety during high-power microwave (HPM) applications. In this study, flashover of nylon in SF6 was induced by a high-voltage pulse that was generated by a pulse formed network (PFN) with the duration of dozens of nanoseconds. Voltage waveform data of the flashover, as a time series, was analyzed using state space reconstruction method. Besides, the time delay τ and embedding dimension m were obtained using the C–C method and G-P algorithm, respectively. Moreover, the movements of trajectory in state space at low dimensions were plotted. According to the results, flashover dynamics exhibited nonlinear chaotic characteristics. For nonlinear systems, the flashover voltage data processing may exhibit specific reference implication in the study of dielectric and insulator design.