Enhanced system availability through condition monitoring can be planned
New ways of increasing reliability
Electrical power forms the basis of modern life. In numerous applications, high availability of this power supply is absolutely essential. The costs caused by a failure can quickly become critical for a company. For many public facilities, such as shopping malls or railway stations, there is no emergency power supply. As soon as a core component in the power supply fails, the entire operation has to be shut down.
In applications where high availability is ensured by redundancies, high costs can nevertheless be incurred if the operator does not have an overview of the state of the overall system and therefore takes precautionary measures. For example, in the event of a failure of the main power supply in hospitals, operations are canceled, processes and data are outsourced in data centers, or processes in industry are shut down in a controlled manner in order to prevent the life-threatening or economically devastating consequences that a failure of the stand-by power supply would entail.
It is almost impossible to increase the availability of a system even further by means of its electrical planning.
Communication-capable protection devices that collect data and permanently provide the operator with information about their state allow the implementation of condition-based maintenance concepts. Failures can thus be prevented in advance. It is estimated that the availability of the system can be increased by up to 30 percent. On the other hand, there is a manageable increase in investment costs. The additional costs for transparency amount to 5 to 8 percent on average.
These costs are quickly recovered by the lower probability of failure and the switch to predictable, condition-based maintenance.
The basis for a condition monitoring concept that enables permanent monitoring of the system state must already be laid
during the electrical planning stage (see Figure 8). Only in this way can it be implemented efficiently and without additional expense.