Project team members (CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT) Dr. Leena Al Sulaiti and Dr. Mohammad Hassan, Dr. Ayman El Hag, and Dr. Ahmed Abdala.
Doha: As a part of Qatar University’s (QU) research mission, a research team at the Center for Advanced Materials (CAM) and the Department of Physics in the College of Arts and Sciences has developed and tested coatings for insulators used in electrical transmission lines.
The research team focuses on improving long-term performance and developing sustainable coatings for high-voltage insulation systems for electric power transmission in Qatar and the Gulf region.
The work is a collaboration between Texas A&M University - Qatar and the University of Waterloo in Canada, and is funded by the Qatar National Research Fund.
The work also involves Qatar General Electricity & Water Corporation (Kahramaa) and the industrial partner CSL-Canada, one of the leading companies developing this kind of coating worldwide, and it is the vending company for the Gulf region. QU now has a testing unit to evaluate the performance of the coating (erosion and tracking) behaviour of the newly designed coatings, and the testing is done according to the industrial standards.
Qatar has a world pioneering experience adapting this type of coatings for more than two decades.
The use of silicone rubber (SIR) coating material on ceramic insulators has been proposed successfully. However, in the long term and particularly in Qatar and the Gulf, humidity, high UV radiation, temperature and lack of rain could lead to the temporary loss of hydrophobicity which causes a degradation of the coatings.
The degradation could result in leaving the overall infrastructure supplying critical clients, such as the oil and gas industry, at risk of electrical power interruption.
Several scientific articles were published recently by the QU team in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) journals, which reflect the high quality of the research work. The team studied the effect of the molecular weight of the fabricated silicon rubber coatings on the degradation behaviour of the locally fabricated coatings.
In addition, local materials were utilised as effective fillers to improve the electrical insulation performance of the coating materials, using green materials, which supports the environmental sustainability aims of Qatar National Vision 2030.
Furthermore, the collaboration with Kahramaa led to critical findings about the coating failure on service sites, and about the parameters that affect commercial coating in the harsh environmental conditions of Qatar.
The local impact of the research project is retrieved from the collaboration with Kahramaa and empowering high school, graduate, and undergraduate students by training them on the preparation and evaluation of the coatings using a wide range of advanced equipment.
These training programmes and workshops can attract more students in the future to get involved in research work.
