Clean oil deposits

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Opin­ions some­times dif­fer on the neces­si­ty of some inspec­tions and main­te­nance work on the trans­former, but every­one agrees on one thing: oil analy­sis is a must. Hard­ly any oth­er test pro­vides as much infor­ma­tion about the state of health and pos­si­ble ther­mal or elec­tri­cal faults as the analy­sis of the insu­lat­ing oil and the gas­es dis­solved in it. To this end, oper­a­tors reg­u­lar­ly send oil sam­ples to exter­nal lab­o­ra­to­ries or com­mis­sion MR’s oil experts. A lot of raw data from the analy­sis lab­o­ra­to­ry ends up on the desks of asset man­agers. Although their val­ue only unfolds with clever fur­ther pro­cess­ing and eval­u­a­tion, inter­pret­ing the lab­o­ra­to­ry results and com­par­ing them with cur­rent stan­dards is time-con­sum­ing, and an asset man­ag­er is usu­al­ly not an expe­ri­enced oil expert. 

There is also often a lack of suit­able analy­sis tools. This makes a com­plete con­di­tion assess­ment and effi­cient coop­er­a­tion with part­ners dif­fi­cult. “This is why we have devel­oped the new oil mod­ule for the asset per­for­mance man­age­ment soft­ware ‘TESSA® APM’. Expe­ri­ence from every­day prac­tice has been incor­po­rat­ed into the devel­op­ment in order to be able to offer a sys­tem for prac­ti­tion­ers,” explains Prod­uct Man­ag­er Leon­hard Link. 

Expert Erwin Hilbert adds: “When expand­ing the TESSA® APM Oil mod­ule, we were main­ly con­cerned with three aspects:Compiling all of the required infor­ma­tion in one sys­tem envi­ron­ment; automat­ing a stan­dards-based inter­pre­ta­tion with a focus­bon anom­alies; and cre­at­ing a cen­tral work­space for indi­vid­ual action rec­om­men­da­tions and assess­ments.”

Workflows: from Excel to excellent  

Mod­ern process­es require dig­i­tal­ized sys­tems and auto­mat­ed work steps that save time and cre­ate clar­i­ty. This is the basis for the devel­op­ment of TESSA® APM Oil. Once the struc­ture of a fleet has been cre­at­ed with the rel­e­vant mas­ter data, all oil data can be man­aged cen­tral­ly with one sys­tem – sim­ply and intu­itive­ly. When new lab­o­ra­to­ry data arrives, the opti­mized input mask or a CSV import enable quick inte­gra­tion of both the files and the data, which are dis­played in a clear inter­face. The ease of use and cen­tral admin­is­tra­tion pro­duce time sav­ings of up to 80 per­cent. The good old Excel spread­sheet is now a thing of the past. 

House recommendations 

In addi­tion to improved data han­dling, eval­u­a­tion is obvi­ous­ly also in focus: What do I do with the lab­o­ra­to­ry val­ues of my trans­former oil? Rel­e­vant lim­it val­ues and algo­rithms from CIGRE, IEC or IEEE are stored in the oil mod­ule. Dis­play­ing the lim­it val­ues of an indi­vid­ual piece of equip­ment makes it eas­i­er for users to main­tain an overview. All this saves users an enor­mous amount of time that they would oth­er­wise spend on look­ing things up and com­par­ing tables. 

Trends can be iden­ti­fied at an ear­ly stage and poten­tial faults can be clas­si­fied using inter­pre­ta­tion meth­ods such as the Duval tri­an­gle, Pen­tagons or IEEE C57.104 from 2019. “The soft­ware-sup­port­ed and spe­cif­ic rec­om­men­da­tions for life-pro­long­ing mea­sures are essen­tial for pre­vent­ing expen­sive repairs or fail­ures before they occur,” says Link. In addi­tion, there is good visu­al­iza­tion: TESSA® APM dis­plays the con­di­tion of the fleet in a con­di­tion and risk matrix with a pri­or­i­tized rank­ing which makes crit­i­cal units imme­di­ate­ly vis­i­ble. The new­ly inte­grat­ed oil index pro­vides an overview of the fleet’s oil con­di­tion in par­tic­u­lar. 

Stronger together  

Instead of shar­ing a mul­ti­tude of indi­vid­ual files in file shar­ing and work­ing with rudi­men­ta­ry tools, TESSA® APM enables col­lab­o­ra­tion between dif­fer­ent roles and thus seam­less coop­er­a­tion: 

• An exter­nal lab­o­ra­to­ry or in-house ser­vice tech­ni­cians can eas­i­ly upload data and man­age equip­ment.  
• Asset man­agers auto­mat­i­cal­ly receive a com­pact sta­tus overview and can quick­ly iden­ti­fy crit­i­cal oper­at­ing equip­ment.  
• Oil experts or MR experts can draw up an indi­vid­ual assess­ment based on many years of expe­ri­ence and record this in an inter­pre­ta­tion report. 

Hilbert explains: “The solu­tion to dig­i­tal dis­or­der and grow­ing com­plex­i­ty is col­lab­o­ra­tive sys­tems that bring togeth­er the peo­ple involved in the process and the rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion. That’s why we are already enabling every­one who orders an oil analy­sis ser­vice from us (from sam­pling and analy­sis in a cer­ti­fied lab­o­ra­to­ry to the cre­ation of an expert report) to access their test reports and mea­sure­ment data in the APM Oil mod­ule. We can adapt the report to their indi­vid­ual needs with lit­tle effort.” 

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