Development of the water – oil interface instability in a vertical electric field

The presence of a contact boundary between water and transformer oil greatly reduces the electrical strength of the oil phase. The presence of an electric field leads to varying degrees of polarization at the interface and the appearance of a force acting on a liquid with a higher dielectric constant (water) in the direction of a liquid with a lower dielectric constant (oil). This leads to the contact surface instability development. Instability as a result of its development leads to a stream of water being drawn into oil volume and a violation of the insulating gap. In this work, we experimentally and numerically study electrohydrodynamic instability at the phase boundary between electrically weakly conductive water and transformer oil in a highly inhomogeneous electric field directed perpendicular to the contact boundary. The results of a full-scale and numerical experiment of studying of the electrohydrodynamic instability development in a strong electric field at the interface between water and transformer oil are presented. The system consists of a spherical electrode with a radius of 3.5 mm, placed in water with a conductivity of 5 $\mu$S/cm , and a thin blade electrode 0.1 mm thick, placed in transformer oil of the GK brand. The contact boundary passes at the same distance from the nearest points of the electrodes, equal to 3 mm. The work shows that at a certain electric field strength, the cone-shaped structure of water grows towards the electrode immersed in transformer oil. A numerical correspondence was obtained for both the shape of the resulting water structure (cone) during the entire growth time and the size measured from its top to the level of the initial contact boundary of phase separation. The dynamics of this structure growth has been studied. Both in numerical calculations and in experiment, it was found that the size of the resulting cone along the electrode connection line depends linearly on time.