Abstract: The insulation recovery characteristics of SF₆ play an important role in the stable operation of GIS, whereas the current SF₆-related breakdown test lacks the study of the insulation recovery process. In this paper, we use the rippling technique that can characterize the flow field structure to build a rippling observation platform to study the insulation recovery process after the breakdown of the bar-plate gap in the GIS gas chamber, obtain the rippling image of the insulation recovery process, and define the fluctuation value of the rippling image based on the method of pulsation analysis in the flow field; moreover we obtain the fluctuation map of the rippling image in multiple time intervals, analyze the difference of the evolution of insulation recovery in different areas, and use the discrete coefficient of the fluctuation value to quantify the fluctuation value. The discrete coefficient of the fluctuation value is used to quantitatively characterize the degree of insulation recovery, the temporal and spatial laws of insulation recovery are obtained, and finally the insulation recovery time is counted. The experimental results show that there are two stages of development and dissipation of the air flow mass movement after the channel breakdown due to the influence of the industrial frequency residual pressure. There are large differences in the morphological changes in the channel during the insulation recovery process, which are reflected in the evolutionary differences between the upper part of the plate electrode and other regions. There are differences in the degree of insulation recovery in different regions of the channel, and the insulation recovery near the rod electrode is slower. The insulation recovery time for the SF₆ insulation at 2 atmospheres is much longer than that at 3 atmospheres. SF₆ insulation recovery time at 2 atmospheres is shorter than that at 3 atmospheres but the difference is not significant, and the air pressure is not a decisive condition affecting insulation recovery. The experimental method and analytical results in this paper provide a reference for the study of insulation recovery process after SF₆ breakdown in slightly inhomogeneous field.