| With the advancement of chemical engineering many newer insulation materials have been developed that have advantages over older materials which are still in use. Polymeric materials are also one of them. From materials point of view their invention can not be marked as new, but their use in insulation system is not older than 25 years. The insulators made up of these materials are correspondingly called polymeric or composite insulators. Since these materials suffer from the problem of environmental degradation due to organic in nature so this time is not enough to guarantee that they can sustain in environments for long time where biological degradation is fast. So to have a correct fact file of prediction of their behavior over a long time (also called aging) a lot of work is in progress. This review describes the work done on their aging until now e.g. Introduction, design and, development history of different types polymeric insulators, Natural and Environmental factors that age insulators, man made factors that damage them, effect of each natural factor in detail and its remedy, artificial and field aging test setups dev eloped in different places in the world, different techniques and methods of analysis used for detection of aging phenomena, results Obtained from various aging sites about various parameters such as high temperature, rain, material additives, pollution, humidity, increased conductivity, sequence of aging phases as they appear in service mentioning affordable, unaffordable effects, service life prediction and testing standards / Guidelines developed for polymeric insulators. |
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