Date: 19-2-2021
ABB sold a large share in their power grids business to Hitachi and formed a new company Hitachi Power Grids and offer a wide range of products and services.
MAP were commissioned to design a build a custom designed test bay for testing their range of power quality products. These include power factor correction component shelves and cubicle builds and fuse gear.
Stage 1 Design
MAP were responsible for the conceptual design, detailed design, procurement, build, test and Factory Acceptance Test. The design consisted of studying the various products and the testing that would be necessary on each product and the following parameters measured:
- Capacitance
- Discharge resistance
- Continuity
- Insulation resistance
- Breakdown voltage immunity
Functional testing also was required such as PF controller bringing in capacitor stages when issuing a lagging power measurement simulated by a current source.
Decisions had to be made to employ commercially available test instruments integrated into the test bay and create custom devices.
A variable speed drive with a sine filter feeding into a step up transformer was employed to create the test voltage up to 7,000 volts with a special leakage measurement circuit.
- Special wound components were designed up to a voltage of 11,000 volts
- A PLC was employed to control all the testing functionality.
- A SCADA was used to provide the test engineer interface and report generator
- Operator screen development with clear instruction to the test engineer.
- Preparation of reports qualifying the pass/fail of the component or assembly.
Stage 2 Build
See photos.
Stage 3 Factory Acceptance Testing
The factory acceptance was conducted at MAP’s premise at Birkenhead with a UK ABB representative plus a Teams link-up to the customer in Saudi Arabia. The following tests were conducted:
- Conforming of ABB safety standards required
- Point to point testing
- Insulation testing
- Withstand test 3kv for 1 second
- Power up test and testing the relevant products
- Demonstration of the operation of the test bay.
