Thermal Imaging For Substations And Power Lines Monitoring
Electric power utilities are facing an ever aging infrastructure, increasing risk of blackouts, brownouts and fires. Utilities are also facing costly unplanned maintenance outages and rising costs of penalties.
Failure Cause and Effect
The risk of blackouts and brownouts are increasing on the power distribution grid due to aging infrastructure, and a lack of automation systems that monitor the condition of critical equipment at substations, powerlines and other points of connections. For example, transformer fluid leaks or internal insulation breakdown cause overheating that leads to failures, while the regional distribution powerlines can spark the devastating bushfires. Whatever the cause is, a failure of insignificantly priced component may cascade into series of catastrophic system failures. The result can be a massive failure of banking facilities, security systems, manufacturing plants, food refrigeration, communication networks, and traffic control systems. Of course, an electric utility involved can lose huge amounts of revenue and incur enormous costs in getting their systems up and running again.
High voltage electrical installations tend to heat up before they fail. By monitoring HV-equipment continuously with thermal imaging cameras costly breakdowns can be avoided.
Thermal Imaging Inspections Protect the Community, Reputation of Power Utility and Money. Thermal imaging technology will improve the reliability and security of your electric power systems. ATII inspectors employ advanced sensing and measurement technology, methods, and digital reporting system. They are able to anticipate, detect, and respond rapidly to problems, thereby reducing maintenance costs, the chance of failure, bushfires, blackouts, community safety and lost productivity. Just one example: one large utility discovered a hot bushing rod in a substation transformer and repaired it at a cost of only $11,000. A similar problem that occurred before the firm instituted its thermal imaging program resulted in a catastrophic failure that cost more than $1,350,000.