Quality Assessment of Low Voltage Surge Arresters

Users expect reliable operation of the surge arrester during overvoltages, which may originate from a switching process or a lightning discharge. The necessary conditions to guarantee these expectations are: appropriate construction of the surge arrester, its production being maintained in accordance with technical standards, and a positive results of the type test (as well routine and acceptance tests). The recipient, especially when purchasing large quantities of the product, can check the final quality of the product through selective testing of samples from the market in order to find the best supplier. This manuscript specifies the basic parameters of low-voltage (LV) surge arresters of four manufacturers. Basic electrical parameters, i.e. leakage current and varistor voltage ( $\text{U}_{\mathrm {1mA}}$ ) before and after the nominal discharge current ( $\text{I}_{\mathrm {n}}$ ) of $8~\mu \text{s}$ /20 $\mu \text{s}$ , were determined for 10 randomly selected surge arresters of each manufacturer. Moreover one sample of each varistor batches was aged by fifty 8 $\mu \text{s}$ /20 $\mu \text{s}$ current impulses with $\text{I}_{\mathrm {n}}$ . The obtained results of structural analysis indicate that the crystal structure of the varistor materials changes after ageing process, affecting its electrical properties. The proposed research methodology can be employed as a basis for forecasting the stability of the arrester parameters under operating conditions.