Electricity Today T&D Magazine

The failure of critical assets leads to unplanned outages, lost revenue and potential worker safety concerns. Medium voltage switchgear and circuit breakers are by far the largest contributor to substation events, and switchgear misoperation often identifies as the root cause of transformer and other equipment failures.

Without monitoring, equipment operators must rely on cyclic maintenance and offline testing to determine switchgear conditions. The ability to properly maintain switchgear through time-based maintenance is becoming less effective because of aging infrastructure, decreasing operating budgets and a decline in specialists.

Our waveform overlay allows for an intuitive and easy-to-interpret visual diagnosis of performance degradation in switchgear mechanics. Therefore, by comparing the waveform signature with memorized reference waveform, deviations are visually apparent and can direct maintenance crews to the problem of performance degradation.

Routine maintenance means that switchgear is operated and de-energized. This action alone often masks performance degradation issues by exercising the mechanics of switchgear. This may prevent crews from truly understanding the state of the equipment between maintenance schedules. The maintenance itself is extremely invasive and often leads to the introduction of new problems that were not previously present.

Using a comprehensive monitoring system will provide a true measure of equipment performance and can mitigate maintenance-induced problems.

The switchgear monitor configuration may also be combined with Dynamic Ratings SCM to provide partial charge monitoring of the switchgear bus and connectors, allowing tracking or faulty connections to be detected.

DynamicMetrix\xc2\xae Desktop is included with the purchase of the BPM. This program allows engineering access to your monitor to view data and perform diagnostics. Upgrade to DynamicMetrix\xc2\xae Fleet to pull data from all of your monitors: transformer, circuit breaker, or third party. This allows users to easily analyze data trends to make educated decisions about maintenance and risk management.