Environmental pollution causes surface contamination of overhead line insulators and in certain situations a discharge may occur. Knowledge of the territorial areas most at risk of contamination is therefore essential for safer management of power lines. The air quality modeling system SMOKE-WRF-CAMx used at RSE has proved effective in addressing the problem of environmental contamination to which insulators are exposed, but requires further study to take into account the complex phenomenology regulating the formation of an electrolytic deposit on the exposed surfaces of insulators. In 2019, first of all, the model validation methodology was improved with respect to the estimation of the ESDD and NSDD parameters. At the same time, the first steps were taken to create a multiscale numerical modeling chain to estimate the level of contamination of overhead line insulators. The modeling activity involved the development and relative validation of a 3D dry particulate matter deposition scheme, DePaSITIA, coupled to the micro-scale Lagrangian air quality model, SPRAY-WEB. An interface software between SPRAY-WEB and the 3D graphics viewer ParaView was then developed.

The computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code ANSYS-CFX has been made operational. Taking into account the geometric characteristics of the insulators, it allows the modeling of the physical quantities necessary to characterize the motion of atmospheric fluid around the insulator.

In addition, an experimental field activity was defined to study the vertical variability of deposition and the effects of meteorological parameters on deposition.

Finally, in collaboration with the Department of Environmental and Earth Sciences (DISAT) of the University of Milan Bicocca (UNIMIB), the chemical composition of the soluble, and therefore conductive, fraction of the deposit on the insulators was analyzed, and experimental work began to study the relationship between the electrical conductivity and chemical composition of atmospheric particulate matter as a function of the thermodynamic conditions of the atmosphere (T and RH).