Energized Insulator Washing
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Often electric lines are situated in locations of excessive contamination. Salt, dust, sand, chemicals, cement and other pollutants can accumulate on insulators.
Pollutants when combined with humidity can greatly limit the efficiency of the insulators on the power networks. If the pollutants are not cleaned off of the insulators, they will form conductive bands or dry bands. These conductive bands enable leakage (also know as creepage) current to jump across the insulator dry band to dry band.
If these contaminants are allowed to accumulate without cleaning, eventually a short circuit to ground called a flashover will occur.
Flashovers are terrible. Flashovers can damage the electric provider equipment and will produce a momentary power fault which means the customer is out of power until the difficulty is corrected.
These blackouts are usually momentary in nature and will come and go irregularly with no evident pattern. This is very frustrating to every person actively trying to put and end to the trouble.
In locations where there is not enough naturally occurring precipitation to naturally clean the insulators, other procedures have to be used.
1. Manual washing - dead line
2. High pressure washing using water - line is off
3. High pressure cleaning with water- live line
If the power company has sufficient capacity then they can choose to turn the power line off and clean manually work crews climb the towers and wash the insulators with cloths and or mild cleaning solutions to eliminate the pollutants) or utilizing a high pressure insulator cleaning machine. However, most networks do not have that choice.
Power lines are very costly to construct, so many electric utilities do not have extra a lot of excess capacity. They often have no option but to clean the insulators with the power on.
Hot line Insulator washers use water. Normal drinking water contains contaminants. The impurities may be conductive or non-conductive. If the impurities are conductive, the water is conductive.
There is a limit on the conductivity that the water can have which is dependent upon the electrical potential. If the water's conductivity exceeds the upper threshold, then it must not be used. In some locations, there is no accessible source of non-conductive water. In these areas, the water borne contaminants must be filtered with reverse osmosis.
The Energized washing equipment is generally custom manufactured to the power company's requirements. Some electric utilities want their equipment fitted with an hydraulic platform so that their linemen can clean from the bucket.Some of these buckets can reach to heights of over 65 meters!
Other power companies have their linemen climb the towers. They use washing equipment mounted on trailers and/or truck chassis. In locations where the terrain can be very hilly, the Energized cleaning equipment, may be assembled (usually a much smaller adaptation of it) on helicopters . The lineman can clean sitting on a chair mounted on the side of the helicopter.
Article Source: Articlelogy.com
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