What Is Furan Testing?

Описание: Furan testing tells us about the condition of the solid insulation inside a transformer.

Traditionally, the only way to find out the condition of paper insulation was during an outage when a physical sample of the paper could be removed and tested. This has always been inconvenient and expensive.

Paper insulation is made of long glucose chain molecules which form into other molecules--furans--as they break down. We can test for furan content in oil (in terms of parts per billion) and tell the condition of the paper.

Furan testing from an oil sample is much more convenient and much less expensive than taking physical paper samples.

Transcription:

What is furan testing? Furan testing is one of the tests we can perform on dielectric fluid inside power transformers. And it tells us about the condition of the solid insulation inside the transformer, which of course we're interested in because the life of the transformer really is the life of the paper. And so we want to know about the condition of a solid insulation inside there. And once upon a time, the only way to find out information about the strength of the paper would be to have an outage, open up the transformer and pull a physical sample, whether a tensile or to do another type of test called degree of polymerization. And while that was good to get information about the solid insulation, it's very inconvenient and expensive to do it that way. So what's neat about furans is what happens the solid installation itself is made of these long glucose chains of molecules.

And as they break down because of time, normal aging or oxidation or acids or moisture, chemically, they're forming into other molecules called furans. And with the right technology, we can look at the fluid and count the number of these furans in there to the tune of parts per billion. And we can look at that and correlate that directly to the strength of the paper. Only you can imagine how much more convenient and inexpensive it is to do that from an oil sample where you don't necessarily have to shut down the assets to be able to do that. And so it's a neat test. It's very cost effective compared to other ways to get the same information that is very useful to have a baseline to know where you start from. And a newer cleaner asset should have a background like 0 to 20 parts per billion. But we also know that if you start watching this over time, and you can trend the data. If you get around 250 parts per billion, you've consumed roughly 25% of the life of that paper. And so you can start to assess, is this a normal aging or are we accelerating the aging of our transformer by way of whatever's going on? And so it's a really neat and cost-effective test that allows us to get good insight to the strength of the paper.

For more information on furans and furan testing, visit: https://www.sdmyers.com/knowledge-vau...

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