Inorganic insulating powder can potentially be used in nuclear power plant cables, fire-resistant cables, and so on due to its high heat resistance and radiation resistance. It is of great academic and engineering value to study the dielectric properties of inorganic insulating powder. In this paper, we aim to study the nonlinear dielectric properties via the measurement of the time-domain polarization current spectrum under the application of a DC electric field. Three kinds of silica powders are measured by a measurement system with adjustable pressure. The effects of powder shape, particle size, and packing pressure and temperature on the dependence of relaxation polarization and electrical conductivity on the applied electric field are studied. The experimental results show that the relationship between electrical conductivity and the electric field of inorganic insulating powder presents two different characteristics, i.e., field-induced enhancement and field-induced weakening. The relationship between conductance and temperature shows an increase with temperature. That is, the electrical conductivity increases or decreases with the increase in temperature. The inorganic powder insulation can be regarded as a composite, which is composed of inorganic powder particles and air gaps. The interface between the powder particles and air gaps contributes a lot to the polarization of inorganic insulating powder. The phenomena (including the field-induced weakening characteristic between relaxation polarization and electric field and the decrease characteristic of polarization with increasing temperature) can be explained by a simplified interface polarization mechanism.

The total current of dielectrics under DC voltage consists of relaxation current and conduction current, which contains the information about the relaxation polarization and conduction. The time-domain spectrum (TDS) is an effective method to study the dielectric properties of insulating dielectrics. In this paper, the TDS method is also used to study the dielectric properties of the compressed inorganic hexagonal boron nitride (BN) and magnesium oxide (MgO) insulating powders. It is interestingly found that these inorganic insulating powders shows an abnormal TDS, where the current decreases monotonically to a certain level at first and then increases with time while in normal TDS the current decreases monotonically with time and finally reaches a steady value which is conduction current. The experiments verify that the abnormal phenomenon is attributed to the moisture absorption of powders during the testing process, which causes an increase in conductivity and leads to the increasing current at the end of testing time. The insulating powder cannot be regarded as a time-invariant system during the measurement, and the time-varying characteristic is mainly manifested in conduction. A time-domain least squares fitting method is presented and is effective to eliminate the deviation from normal TDS. The results of this paper provide a reference for dealing with abnormal TDS.