An Electric Field Feature Set for Breakdown Voltage Prediction of Rod-plane Air Gaps Using Least Squares Support Vector Machine

Air gap breakdown voltage is a decisive factor for insulation design of various electrical equipment, which is closely related to the electrostatic field distribution. This paper proposes a feature set including 66 physical and mathematical quantities extracted from the electric field calculation results to characterize rod-plane air gaps, which are defined in a conical region and on an interelectrode path. These features are input to a breakdown voltage prediction model established by least squares support vector machine (LS-SVM). A case study was carried out to predict the breakdown voltages of rod-plane air gaps with different rod sizes and gap distances. The prediction results have a high accuracy compared with experimental values and the mean absolute percentage errors (MAPEs) are within 1.4%.