How to link smart devices to your power transformer

By connecting the CoreSense products to a communication network, this becomes your first building block for linking your smart device to your transformer.

Power transformers and their accessories are critical nodes in electricity networks and are subjected to heavy stresses during their lifetime. Most of the substations are unmanned and very remote, with little information that can be used to access the transformer’s performance on the network or investigate the level of maintenance required after an event.

Furthermore, with today’s technology of mobile devices, people want to have access to data immediately and real-time. So, how do you link an aging transformer to your state-of-the-art smart devices?

First, remember that key indicators of the heavy stresses are dissolved in oil as gases. The key parameters for power transformer on-line monitoring includes gases-in-oil, moisture-in-oil, temperatures, and load currents. Installing intelligent electronic devices on the transformer will enable the conversion of the key parameters or analog measurements to the digital world we now live in. Using intelligent electronic devices is the foundation or the first building block that will enable the link of the smart devices to the transformer.

Second, gases in transformer oil serve as chemical indicators of potential transformer problems that can result in interrupted operations and unplanned expenditures. The dissolved gases in the oil should be a key parameter to be monitored to assess the transformer’s performance. The technology used to monitor the gases should be, most importantly, maintenance free and easy to install.

At the same time, also very easy to configure and use. Utilities are focused on reducing maintenance expenses. They do not want to shift the maintenance cost of the transformer to the maintenance cost of the intelligent electronic devices. This means that having a reliable intelligent electronic device that can measure dissolved gases in the oil would be the perfect combination.

ABB has combined forces to produce the best-in-class intelligent electronic devices to enable this digitization of the information from the transformer. This effort consisted of combining ABB’s transformer manufacturing experience with sensing capabilities. ABB offers two types of on-line DGA sensors – a CoreSense™ for hydrogen and moisture sensing and the CoreSense™ M10 for multi-gas monitoring.

The multi-gas unit utilizes proven Fourier Transform Infra-Red (FTIR) technology used in raw material identification. Reliability, robustness, maintenance free, accuracy, and ease of use have been built into the CoreSense product family of transformer monitoring devices. By connecting the CoreSense product to a communication network, it becomes your first building block for linking your smart device to your transformer.

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