Online condition monitoring system for substation and service transformers

Deregulation in power industry accelerates competition among various power companies. These companies are trying to gain maximum profit with minimum maintenance cost. This could be achieved by developing a condition-based monitoring product for the assessment of health of substation and service transformers. This study presents online condition monitoring system (OCMS) for transformers which is useful to replace reactive and preventive maintenance of transformers by predictive maintenance. Proposed OCMS is cost effective, online and accurate tool and it has several features like proposing corrective actions for the benefit of power utilities. Proposed system results are evaluated by comparing with the results obtained from utility model. Proposed OCMS applies only to transformers without abnormal faults such as detected by dissolved gas analysis. It is therefore very different from the other health index algorithms present in the market for condition monitoring of transformers, including in case of abnormal faults.