Monitoring of electrical equipment failure indicators and zero-planned outages: Past, present and future maintenance practices

Electrical System Preventive and Predictive Maintenance methodologies have experienced growth due to new available technologies. This paper will review the historical and current approaches to electrical equipment maintenance, and also provide available technologies which support the future modes of equipment maintenance. Low Voltage and Medium Voltage systems will be reviewed. The need for improved reliability and uptime continues and effective monitoring systems support a new concept of Zero-Planned Outages. Monitoring parameters linked to potential failure modes allows for two key needs to be addressed: first, to notify end-users of a pending failure condition; and second, to recommend maintenance and/or inspections based on a trending analysis of failure mode contributing parameters rather than planned outages. This paper shall review both IEEE and end-user surveyed failure indicators and technologies to continuously monitor and alarm on such failure indicators.