Great HV Insulation Engineering Book

["Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>]

Original poster: "Bert Hickman by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <bert.hickman-at-aquila-dot-net>

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 Tesla 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-dot-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-dot-com