Page 37 - E-Newsletter

37

When an eerie blue glow lit up the sky above New York City last December,
some were disappointed to learn that aliens weren’t involved. The cause was,

in fact, terrestrial: a transformer had exploded at a local powerplant.

For the most part, transformers—which help power companies transmit
electricity efficiently by altering voltages—are relatively safe. Fewer than one
percent explode—but those explosions can be deadly, and result in flying

projectiles, toxic fires, or oil spills.

Transformers rupture due to a build up of excess pressure in the tank in which
they are encased, which is usually filled with mineral oil that acts as a coolant.
Contaminants within the oil, the degradation of transformer parts, and

electrical storms can all cause a fault, called an internal arc, that results in a
rapid release of energy.

The internal arc inside the transformer heats up the oil and the oil burns to
create a gas which causes high pressure. Conventional tank designs are not

capable of resisting such high energies which can reach up to 150 megajoules,
equivalent to 150 sticks of dynamite. ABB , based in Varennes , Canada has
been working for over seven years to build a more resilient transformertank.

Their solution, described in a paper published 12 June in IEEE Transactions on

Power Delivery, is called TXpand. The idea is startlingly simple: design a tank
that’s flexible enough to deform to absorb all that extra pressure without

rupturing.

Source: https://spectrum.ieee.org