Introduction: The scope of the project is to have a fully automated live system installed and tested at Tealing substation.The system will be installed and commissioned by Pointer Ltd with technical support from FLIR Ltd to develop the required software enabling faults to be recognised and temperature alarms to be activated. The data will be gathered from continual thermovisual inspection during the winter period. Alerts will be actioned by the security bureau and passed to the site engineers for further investigation. An evaluation will be completed at the end of the trial with recommendations of the system’s suitability for transfer to BAU.

Objectives:

The objectives for the project are;

• To complete a field based trial of the thermal imaging system at Tealing substation; gather the data from the winter period and compare to data obtained from manual thermovisual inspection.
• Develop preferred system settings and rule based condition monitoring for SVCs.
• Evaluate the system’s suitability as a condition monitoring tool for BAU adoption and its impact on asset management.

Expected Benefits: The project will be successful if it can be determined whether or not the fully automated thermal survey system is able to provide timely and accurate condition monitoring for improved asset management efficiencies. Successful evaluation of the system’s performance on an operational SVC is key to the overall success of the project.