On high-voltage switchgear condition assessment, defect diagnostics and testing.
These papers set out the methods HVPACE uses in the field and the reasoning behind them — in enough detail to be argued with. They are written for the people who have to make the call on a piece of plant: asset managers, substation test and maintenance engineers, and switchgear manufacturers.
A ±10% pass band is 12 ms wide. The fatigue crack that eventually fractured this drive shaft moved closing time by 2 ms.
Conventional circuit breaker timing analysers verify that operating parameters sit inside an allowed range. They were never designed to detect degradation in progress, and four structural limits — end-point measurement, acceptance bandwidth, sampling bandwidth and single-shot pass/fail — put early mechanical defects out of reach. This paper works through a drive shaft that passed its last routine test and later fractured in service, then sets out how microsecond-resolution vibration measurement and baseline trending close that gap.
Further papers are in preparation. If there is a measurement problem you would like covered, tell us — the series is driven by what people actually run into on site.
Power Asset Condition Engineering Limited (HVPACE) is an Auckland-based engineering company specialising in high-voltage equipment condition assessment and diagnostics. We work with asset owners and engineering teams across New Zealand and internationally, providing independent engineering assessment alongside specialised high-voltage test equipment and diagnostic instruments.
If you have equipment where the standard test results look acceptable but the behaviour does not, that is the kind of problem these methods were built for.
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