SPI Inspections provides their customers with utility system and infrastructure inspections. The team uses Flir thermal cameras and other equipment to deliver inspection services and independent verification of construction standards and monitoring of power systems.
Built with 124 microphones, the Si124 produces a precise acoustic image that visually displays ultrasonic information in real-time on top of a digital camera picture. This allows the user to visually pinpoint the source of the sound.
Elton Hunter, field manager at SPI, said: “We've really assisted our customers. Our goal is to make their systems work better, safer, and be more reliable.”
Additionally, the Si124 can detect partial discharge from high-voltage systems.
Partial discharge—caused by a breakdown in electrical insulation—can be detected when the air around the breakdown becomes ionised. This creates “corona”, which can be detected by acoustic imaging, identified by a “meatball” of sound in the image.
The team had previously been using ultraviolet technology to detect corona, but found the Si124 achieved about the same result for a fifth of the price.
“The camera has wonderful clarity for us in the field,” Hunter continued. He said his team appreciated the quality of the images, ease of download to a laptop or the cloud, and the functionality of the user interface. “We're guys that have been in construction for 40-plus years—we've got arthritis and big swollen fat hands hitting hammers and stuff. The user interfaces—the keys, the touch boards—are very user friendly. We found them very easy to work with.”
The Si124 made it easier to spot failures from the ground. During their test run of the camera, they found a failure on a power line 220 feet up in the air, a difficult issue to detect. “With our drones we could, but we would have known where to look,” Hunter added. “Because of our field experience we were able to pick it out and zoom in on it, then we knew that there was a bit of a problem up there.”
“That's a 25-million-dollar failure on a line that's only five years old,” he remarked. With the Si124 they were able to catch the problem before the cost to fix it became nearly that high.
The electrical substations and other utility infrastructure present hazards for workers and inspectors. When the team confronted a particularly dangerous area inside the substation where a capacitor bank had come down, they were required to stay outside the chain-link fence enclosing the area. They were found that the Si124 could look through the fence to assess the situation.
“We were able to walk right up, and we could look right through the chain-link fence. Because there's 124 microphones on the front of the camera and then one little tiny camera,” Hunter explained, “that camera was able to look right through that two by two inch square and keep our people safe, which is a huge advantage for us being in the field.”
SPI’s goal during inspections is to catch issues before they’re allowed to escalate too far. Spotting partial discharge and corona early with tools like the Si124 helps them anticipate failures and keep the lights on for their clients. “It allows us to preemptively prognosticate what's happening in our power line,” said Hunter. “So instead of there being a catastrophic failure and then an outage and a repair, we can go in ahead of time and we can tell them, ‘hey, you're going to have a problem with this if you don't fix it’.”
Unplanned outages can be prevented with regular inspection and maintenance. “If we do our jobs right, nobody ever knows we're out there. The customer doesn't know we're there; we go do our job, we make recommendations, and then through planned outages or regular maintenance they can repair something.”