Power Transformers
Unprecedented growth in electric power consumption has created increasing demand for effective management and monitoring of what are among a utility company’s most valuable pieces of infrastructure – power transformers. Expected to work continuously over many years of service, these costly items present operators with a number of challenges when it comes to protection and preserving useful life.
Monitoring of transformer winding hot spots is critical to safeguarding transformers from damage and extending their usable life. Created by flux leakage from the transformer windings, hot spots are the transformer’s highest temperature area. Excessive heat can degrade the insulating paper on which transformer life depends, making units susceptible to catastrophic failure. As a result, accurately monitoring temperature conditions is critical. However, harsh environments that include complex temperature variants, high voltages and RFI and EMI make accurately measuring hot spot winding temperature difficult.
Because of this, conventional methods simulate or calculate hot spot temperature from oil monitoring, but do not accurately measure it. This can result in differences of up to 20 °C from the actual hot spot temperature. In addition, top & bottom oil measurements can introduce a significant time lag related to real winding temperatures. Because transformer aging rate doubles for every 6 °C over the temperature set point, inaccurate temperature measurements can lead to transformer damage and transformer loss of life.
Utility power transformers demand accurate hot spot measurement
Fiber optic monitoring addresses these challenges by sensing temperature directly in the windings. Advanced Energy pioneered the field of fiber optic winding temperature measurement more than 40 years ago with its Luxtron range of Fluoroptic® thermometer (FOT) sensors and is a premier provider of direct, real-time hotspot monitoring and control outputs for the power utility industry. The company’s reliable, accurate fiber optic monitors direct measurement systems – which are immune to high voltage, RFI, EMI, transformer oil, and SF6 gas – quickly detect and respond to hot spot conditions, triggering alarms and relays to protect valuable transformer assets.
Take, for example, AE’s ThermAsset®2 controller, which is designed to measure winding hot spots in real time and activate the transformer cooling system. This allows for optimum transformer operation at safe load capacity during overload conditions.
Advanced Energy ThermAsset®2 controller
Semiconductor Manufacturing
Advanced Energy is also a specialist in semiconductor manufacturing solutions, offering highly accurate power delivery, frequency tuning, and multi-level pulsing solutions for advanced plasma control in critical etching, deposition, inspection, implantation, and annealing processes.
Optimizing yield and throughput requires highly accurate temperature measurement and control. Fiber optic-based FOT technologies are becoming increasingly important. Take, for example, AE’s Luxtron range of fiber optic thermography technologies that have been designed to support precise process control for customer innovations. Leveraging fiber optic probes with phosphor sensor technology, Luxtron FOT sensing systems combine high-performance converters with an advanced light source, a proprietary software algorithm, and low-noise amplification circuitry.
The Luxtron® M-1100 is the latest FOT converter platform offering fiber optic temperature sensing for semiconductor manufacturing etch and deposition applications.
This instrument provides temperature measurements from
-200 °C (the start of the cryogenic range), to ‘hot chuck’ temperatures of 450 °C with industry-leading accuracy of +/- 0.1 °C and stability of +/- 0.05 °C. Integration of five channels facilitates connection to multiple probes using a single converter, while flexible communication outputs simplify digital monitoring, status monitoring and system integration. In addition, the Luxtron M-1100 is the first model to offer both analog and EtherCAT communication interfaces.
The new converter simplifies implementation by enabling wall-mounting on the side of the system being monitored. User experience is further enhanced with support from Advanced Energy’s global engineering and applications teams, which collaborate with OEMs to develop custom probes for leading edge applications.
A row of power equipment
For wafer semiconductor manufacturing equipment requiring temperature monitoring of electrostatic chucks, chambers, and other devices, AE developed workhorse m920 OEM module series providing fiber optic temperature sensing between -100 and 330 ºC for semiconductor OEMs.
The complete Luxtron® m920 series OEM solution is built using an electronics module assembly with two boards plus probes. The main board contains fiber optic temperature sensing channels, digital output (RS232 ASCII and RS485 Modbus), and power connection. The analog output board provides 0 to 10 V or 4 to 20 mA output. An optional metal enclosure is also available.
Contact: www.advancedenergy.com
info@aei.com
Relevant product links:
Fiberoptic Sensors
Thermasset2
Luxtron M-1100
M920 OEM module
