Electricity. It lets you know when it wants out
 

15KV Load break switch. Or should I say FORMER load break switch.

Hello. :leaving:

Metal-Clad switchgear is pretty heavy-duty. But 15KV is on the low end.

What's the application?

Wait till you have 440V at 300 amps blow up in your face with an arc flash.

I quit work for over an hour because of that. Took out the whole section of a FOB when I did that. :rofl:


No voltage or amperage is on the low end.

Failure or surge?

We run a network(not IT) system here. This was a feeder for our Neutron research facility cooling system.

Failure- no surge.

I have told the bean counters many times electrical equipment should be in buildings. Nema 3R be damned

I know in all the critical comms facilities (Nuke Command and Control type shit) the incomers, transformers, UPS, Generators, switch gear are all in environmentally controlled areas.

Nothing is outside. Protection and to extend durability.

15KV is considered medium voltage but it's at the lower end of the scale.

My company makes medium voltage switchgear and although we do make 15KV stuff the majority is 27, 29, or 38KV

The metal clad stuff make by Eaton in the picture goes from 5 to 15KV so it's at the high end of that product line, for them, but not the high end for general switch applications typically used by electric companies.

I know ABB and Siemens makes a lot of the higher end stuff.

Either one of those?

Most of our site is Eaton. Our 15KV substation is Eaton. We’ve had a couple of failures, but they handle them without too much fuss. Our building distribution is 480V and 208V. We do have 7 4160V chillers.

FPE. :funnier::funnier::funnier:

Pffft. One of our generators puts out over 20,000 volts and goes through a step-up transformer to 345,000 volts.

That’s it. That’s all I know about the electrical side of our plant. Shit scares me. You can SEE a water leak. Electricity? Not so much.

:rofl:

I use a drone at work with IR and scope out PEPCOs 69KV feeders feeding us. That’s as close as I get to arial power. Screw that. Ever watch those crazy SOBs that climb around on energized cables from a helicopter ?

I always wonder about the first guy that ever did that.

We're started using drones to inspect our transmission lines too.

No; those two and Eaton are competitors of ours.

I went to the IEEE T&D convention in Denver in 2018. I was walking around taking pics. Mostly I had no idea what I was looking at. I just took pics of stuff that looked cool to show Mrs Flex when I got back.

Wandered into the Eaton booth and some dude saw my company name on my lanyard and started giving me a a hard time about taking pics. I said "Dude, I'm in finance I don't even know wtf I am looking at."

He was not amused. Fukkem. :rofl:

Yep, sales guy showed me this vid a while back. Freaky as hell.

Wild how they touch that rod to the power line to equalize the potential. I don't even get how that works.

:leaving:

They become part of the circuit.

I worked in a lab that had three phase power supplying a dyno. It had three 350MCM cables at each phase at the breaker. The breaker blew and copper was splattered inside like it was hot wax.

This thread is shocking.

:flush:

Someone call aero.

thankfully it wasnt a really serious arc flash or you would be buried. ive seen 480 volts blow too many times to discuss over the years.

i remember doing the new chillers at the U.S. Mint. 4200 volt GE Multilin starters we had to rewire the internals to go from one brand spec to another in terms of interlocks. we had to bring the ge tech in to program a few things like ramp timing, fla, etc. when we turned that sumbitch on that poor dude was crapping his pants, lol.

BS, loose more in ionization to the air than leaving it at say 50 kv.....witch is kinda high at that......I can't imagine how in HELL 50kv acts in say a rain storm......at 7x that potential, RMS I can't see how in HELL any ONE or THING is safe......

:cert:

You're the same guy that thought a few 6" pipes would be enough water to supply a typical plant if I remember correctly.

That’s nothing. I’ve got a 50kv bobulator with a water cooled step up transformer putting out 1.2 jiggawatts to a pure goobernium whackotron that feeds my super strongium fleshlight boner zapper.

Do you have one for each individual penis?

As a machinist, I make various parts for industry. One of the parts is copper bars for use in electrical equipment. The parts get silver ( or at least a silver color) plated.

One of the guys from the company brought back a part they needed to be replaced. He said "We had a little problem" with a big grin.

The copper bar was 4" wide and 3/4" of an inch thick ( rounded edges) and started life 10" long.

It was now about 6" long and the missing part looked like "hot fingers" scooped out the copper.

I asked WTF happened and he said it was quite loud as the copper turned to vapor and disappeared due to a short.

F that. I'll work on multi ton weldments in the lathe before I work with anything more than house current. ( yes, I know 120VAC can kill you )

Yes. Yes I do. Thanks for rembering. And for an unforgettable night.

Doing industrial security work in the early 80's a couple of my trips were to new clear power plants.......interesting to say the least......one of them was under full tilt operation one of the top guys was nice enough to take me around the joint......impressive to say the least.....transformers the size of houses......

a field full of them.......generators too big to imagine

:dance::seasix:

Speaking of electricity wanting out...

I worked for Trane and only saw (4) 4160V chillers in my tenure... and don't want to see them again.

I've installed a few of those over the years. Big centrifugal bastards.

We now have 4 Synchronous motor chillers and 3 dual motor split units installed by Johnson Controls. And yes, big bastards.

Them guyz is nuckin FUTZ!!!!!!! anyone here ever been bit off an old vacuum tube color TV?? knock your ass right off the chair.......and that power is rated in milli-amps.......I can't imagine how in HELL that pilot keeps the bird that steady, considering any wind at that height......

:issues:

I did a short stint with Johnson years ago. Back when building controls were pneumatic. These days almost all new installations are DDC.

??????

DDC = Direct Digital Control

DDC is so much better than pneumatic. Leaky bastards. We have to run 3 compressors to keep up with air demand. Energy nightmare.

Cut my teeth on pneumatics, they work for years as long as the aftercooler is working. Death of a pneumatic systems is oil and water carryover. Plus they are truly an "open" system with anyone's direct or reverse acting thermostat being interchanged. Or a damper or valve actuator could be replaced with another manufacturer (JCI, Honeywell, BC, Robertshaw)...as long as you had the right spring range. Lighting certainly didn't hurt them and no one could hack in.

When the first DDC systems came out and we were doing hospital work, the engineers weren't confident that the DDC system would work so we had to install a redundant pneumatic system plus the electronic system.

Now all we install is electronic and I'm the only one that can tell the youngsters what to rip out in the old control panels!

I took this drone shot of our power plant last week for our local utility. It consists of a 8 MW COGEN, 2 type D boilers, and 7 RU's.

Better view.

I already worked on it once. Can't you tell ?

Electrical engineering degree here. The way it works is amazingly simple. The helicopter is just a big chunk of metal suspended in the air. When you touch the metal cable to a high voltage line, initially there is a small amount of current that flows from the high voltage line to the helicopter, until the entire helicopter is at the same voltage potential. The charge itself just distributes itself on the outside of the air frame, and the occupants likely don't even feel a thing. Since there is no path to ground, air being a very good insulator, the power line and the helicopter and everyone touching the helicopter are now at the same potential, and someone could literally grab onto that 200 kV line (whatever it is) with their bare hand and be fine. But if they got near anything else that had a path to ground or a different phase, insta-zap death.

What is a shock to ME is that the humidity in the air would not make for a tingling sensation to anyone in the copter......and of course if it was RAINING???

Exactly how it was explained to me but I still can't get my head around it.

My thoughts are that in order for the electricity to determine there is no ground/path it still has to flow through you. So why wouldn't you feel it or get electrocuted?

Just as an FYI pure water does NOT conduct electricity.

Water conducts electricity only because most of it is not pure; it contains dissolved solids. When those solids are dissolved they split into positive and negative ions, and that is what allows it to conduct electricity.

Oh. I know one more thing. Our new generator weighed 500 ton. You should have seen the rigging on that bitch. Our Steam Generators were ‘Only’ 300 ton.

It only takes a very small amount of charge to accumulate for the potential of the line to match the potential of the helicopter/occupants. And this charge will always distribute on its most happy resting place which is the outside of a metal shell. You'll get about the same amount of charge on your body that you'd get by rubbing a balloon on your hair. And indeed, your hair would probably be sorta frizzed out as the like-charged particles (electrons in this case) that are on each hair repel one another. Like when you see people who touch Tesla coils. The potential is very high, the charge/current is very very low.

Would you feel anything in the helicopter? I'm sure you would, but it wouldn't be unpleasant, just perhaps a bit unnerving to n00bs. If you were actually inside the helicopter, you wouldn't feel anything because you are essentially inside of a Faraday cage. The net charge inside a Faraday cage is zero. All the charge is on the outside.

High humidity would not be a problem. Even saturated to 100% humid air is a very good insulator. If it was raining hard enough to lower the resistance of the air, and the rain itself was dirty enough to conduct electricity well, at that point it would probably be unsafe conditions in general and they wouldn't even be flying around in a chopper around power lines period. But just a little rain would be OK, it would just make the distance you could get from a grounded object a bit farther. Like instead of being safe at 4 feet away when it's not raining, maybe you'd be safe only from 5 feet away.

We have Corona (not virus) detection in our 15KV substation. I'm OK with snap,crackle,pop. I run like hell if I hear bacon frying.

We work on pipeline right of ways, so we're around high line easements fairly often, as they're often in the same easement, or they cross each other. You can get a reasonable tingle of a shock when grabbing a truck door handle or touching metal on a tractor while standing on the ground, even while wearing rubber boots, if you're around those high lines. For what it's worth, Houston is high humidity a LOT of the time, some are saying, most of the time. We've got high humidity, I can tell you that.

Absolutely. That wouldn’t be the case if the lines carried DC current, but you’re well grounded and human bodies have a small capacitance which can result in what you’re describing. It’s not dangerous but definitely unnerving. AC current flowing in the lines induces current in pretty much anything nearby that is grounded, even in a vacuum.

To AC current, air/vacuum has this property. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_permittivity

In electrical shop in high school, we would put leads on a DC variable power supply and put one in each hand while someone cranked up the juice. We'd see how high it would get before you had to let go. Imagine your whole body feeling like hitting your funny bone in your elbow. You body feels like a giant vibrator.

Yup.
It's pretty expensive to get that stuff out of water, and even then, there's always ions in water due to auto ionization.

One of the ways we measure water purity is with resistance. The system I use will purify water up to 18 MΩ.

I assume the water is in a glass container when measured, but how far apart are the electrodes used for measuring?? and how large are they??

:confused5::dance:

We have some of these at work. I'm sure you guys know more about them than I do.

Attachment 46908

I used to work for a company that sold Reverse Osmosis water purifiers (have one in my kitchen) and we had a contraption to show the before and after RO purification process where we had a light bulb hooked up to a plexiglass tub with electrodes at the end. With regular tap water the bulb would light up. With RO water it wouldn't.

The sales guys would even stick their hands in the RO water with the current on.

Dorked this up. Sorry.

Part of our incoming voltage is 15KV and part is 138KV. We routinely move power to the pot lines according to what the market does. Two of our transformers are on the 138KV feed and three of them on the 15KV, two of the four Generators feed our 15KV for the plant, one feeds 138KV and the fourth is a split ownership feeding the 138KV to the grid and us.
We consume about 97 MW per pot line, 300 MW total when all three are running. Our Reversing Mill surges 15 MW when it starts and stops. Very large motor on that mill.
We do a few strange things with our power. Type 1 and Type 2 demand interruptions. If the midwest grid needs power due to a power plant going offline, we can dump a pot line for up to 1 hour and give 100 MW to the grid. We also do a thing called Modulation, basically our tap changers on the transformers are controlled from the grid operators. We vary our amperage from 125,000 amps to 132,000 amps to help distribute load on the grid. Some pretty cool stuff with power around our plant.
And that panel pictured above, had one dance itself right off the wall with the arc flash. That was a 15KV substation panel.

AND just now as I wuz trying to click on this thread, I had a power outage that lasted maybe 1/4 of a second, just enuff to force computer into a reboot....and of course wife goes to change channel on the TV and finger on rong button, so it's into a reboot also......so TWO reboots in same room, cause two separate causes......kan't win......

effing arthurongus acting up this AM, for no reason, so 1000 mg of ibuprofen....:issues:

That is a recloser doing it's job.

When there's a fault it cuts power then recloses the circuit when the fault clears.

My company makes those.

I imagine FERC compliance is a pretty big deal for you?

GOOD, so the thing senses when there is an overload, could be a bad xfmr or maybe a down wire, so how does it know when the circuit is clean enough to reclose the connection?? :dance::confused5:

Reclosers are only used on overhead lines, because they frequently have temporary faults, like a tree branch or animal or something.

It will try 3 times to reclose and if the fault still exists it will stay in the open position.

Yes for our power plant. Whole bunch of regulations. We have our own power plant plus 4 tie lines feeding into/out of the plant. Vectren has a station next to us, Culley, which could feed one of the pot lines if needed. I've actually had to do the switching over to the Pot Line interchange when our power plant had issues with a Breaker for two of our pot lines. Christmas day last year, 3 hours of downtime on two of the lines. If we touch on 1 hour we are scrambling, two we are very nervous it might not recover. At 3 hours we are pretty sure we will loose at least 75 of the 150 pots. We came out of it not loosing a single pot.

Our rectifier road is pretty impressive with all the main regulating transformers, then the individual skid transformers and phase shift transformers. Line 3 has 1 Main and 10 rectifier transformers, Line 4 and 5 each have 1 main and 6 rectifier transformers. Each rectifier transformer feeds two skids. Each rectifier transformer can provide approximately 14KVA to the skids. The lines are 700VDC at 132,000 each.
Lots of air switches, pringles and Gas switches. For the rest of the plant there is a multitude of substations my Maintenance department is responsible for maintenance on. We keep two power engineers busy on our side plus the one at the power plant.

You can google Alcoa Warrick Operations and see the size of the plant.

Never heard the term before.....rectifier is easy......just a one way valve for current flow, when presented with current/voltage......so is the term transformer, changes the voltage/current levels between primary and secondary......but overall power is same on output and input, minus some small losses in the unit itself...it gets warm.....

but what is the relationship between those two distinct devices in that combo you mentioned there.......and WHY?? and the way you talked of it, sounds like those rectumflyers are VERY manly in their forward conduction in amps.....so what how/what are they made of???

I visited a few power plants in the early 80's when doing security work, and got a cooks tour of the joints, but never heard that what you speaking of.....

:confused5:

The transformer steps down the voltage from 15KV or 138KV to allow the rectifier (Diode Banks) to rectify the voltage from AC to 700 VDC for use in the pot lines. Each pot uses maximum of 5 volts, typically around 4.6 volts we just say 5) 150 pots x 4.6 = 700VDC with 132,000 amps flowing thru the open aluminum bus work. All the floors are ungrounded. You can walk up and touch the bus with no effect. Very high magnetism around the lines. We have to have special mobile equipment to drive over the bus in between the pots. Each room has 35 pots south and 40 pots north (75 per room). The power flows up one room and back to the rectifier in the other room. One skid at the rectifier is positive the other negative. Some pretty cool stuff with electricity.
The pots themselves are like a great big battery when you pull the main power off the line. They hold a couple volts apiece.

OK, what you calling a POT, is short for potentiometer.....or volume control in typical speak......to MY way of thought.... so just what to those pots feed and how are they adjusted?? sorry to be a PITA, but an ancient tech head just wants/NEEDS to get his brain around something unknown.....

In the Smelting terminology a Pot is the object which holds the Cathode blocks, Anode Blocks, Alumina, Coke and Flouride to create a Chemical reaction to produce Aluminum. The pot holds all the material and by passing electricity thru the cathode blocks and Anode Blocks creates a chemical reaction to produce the Aluminum.
This will explain it a little better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_smelting