Reconfigurable instrumentation system for power distribution modeling

Power transformers´ failures carry great costs to electric companies since they need resources to recover from them and to perform periodical maintenance. To avoid this problem in four working 40 MVA transformers, the authors have implemented the measurement system of a failure prediction tool that is the basis of a predictive maintenance infrastructure. The prediction models obtain their inputs from sensors, whose values must be previously conditioned, sampled and filtered, since the forecasting algorithms need clean data to work properly. Applying data warehouse (DW) techniques, the models have been provided with an abstraction of sensors the authors have called virtual cards (VC). By means of these virtual devices, models have access to clean data, both fresh and historic, from the set of sensors they need. Besides, several characteristics of the data flow coming from the VCs, such as the sample rate or the set of sensors itself can be dynamically reconfigured. A replication scheme was implemented to allow the distribution of demanding processing tasks and the remote management of the prediction applications. Virtual cards and the modular architecture proposed make the system versatile and scalable, respectively. The system is currently installed and working in four power distribution plants of a Spanish electric company.