Many
electric utilities have employed equipment condition monitoring (ECM) to
maintain electric equipment in top operating condition while minimizing the
number of interruptions.
With ECM, equipment
operating parameters are automatically tracked to detect the emergence of
various abnormal operating conditions.
This allows
substation operations personnel to take timely action when needed to improve
reliability and extend equipment life.
This
approach is applied most frequently to substation transformers and high-voltage
electric supply circuit breakers to minimize the maintenance costs of these devices,
to improve their availability, and to extend their useful life.
Equipment
availability and reliability can be improved by reducing the amount of off-line
maintenance and testing required and by reducing the number of equipment failures.
To be truly
effective, equipment condition monitoring should be part of an overall
condition-based maintenance strategy that has been properly designed and
integrated into the regular maintenance program.
ECM IEDs are
being implemented by many utilities. In most implementations, the communication
link to the IED is via a dial-up telephone line.
To
facilitate integrating these IEDs into the substation architecture, the ECM
IEDs must support at least one of today’s widely used IED protocols: Modbus, Modbus
Plus, or DNP3 (distributed network protocol). In addition, a migration path to
UCA is desired.
If the ECM
IEDs can be integrated into the substation architecture, the operational data
will have a path to the SCADA system, and the nonoperational data will have a
path to the utility’s data warehouse. In this way, the users and systems
throughout the utility that need this information will have access to it.
Once the
information is brought out of the substation and into the SCADA system and data
warehouse, users can share the information in the utility. The “private”
databases that result in islands of automation will go away.
Therefore,
the goal of every utility is to integrate these ECM IEDs into a standard
substation integration architecture so that both operational and nonoperational
information from the IEDs can be shared by utility users.
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