Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
A series of educational and informative electric power reliability and transformer management articles, including topics such as DGA testing and monitoring, moisture reduction, reliability assessments, training, hot oil sampling and cleaning, IR scanning, engineered products, ultrasound, safety, and more.
By Guest Blogger Traci Hopkins, senior training & education advisor, SDMyers
Whatever style of workforce training your organization practices—on-the-job training, trade school, equipment-specific skills courses, internships, or external technical training—there is one thing that can amplify that training’s effectiveness and increase retention significantly: continuity. [Read more…]
In May 2018, we sponsored a summit that brought electric power reliability leaders from all over the country to Houston to discuss the gap in reliability. I’ve had a few weeks now to reflect on the event, and I want to share those thoughts with you.
If SDMyers was the mother of the Electric Power Reliability Summit (EPRS), then I feel like I was the midwife. [Read more…]
by Alan Ross
I went to Washington recently to represent the SMRP Government Relations Smart Grid Committee, of which I am now the chair. I was there with other folks from SMRP to talk about the smart grid, and we ended up talking a lot about safety. The Society for Maintenance and Reliability Professionals—the fastest growing reliability organization in the world—is about to become an OSHA Alliance organization. That’s a big deal, because there are only a few organizations in the alliance and you have to jump through a lot of hoops to get in. SMRP has done that. [Read more…]
by Alan Ross
As professionals in the field of electrical system reliability, we have a choice.
We can follow the leaders, or we can follow the losers.
It may seem harsh to say that there are “losers” out there, because that’s one of the words that nobody likes to hear. Well, I don’t mean “loser” in the same way kids do when they hold up an “L” on their foreheads on the playground (see above). I mean it in the literal sense. A loser is someone who has experienced loss. [Read more…]
I had to learn a lot to become a transformer reliability leader. I have an engineering background and a transformer maintenance and testing background, but to be the practitioner I wanted to be I had to get educated. I sought out reliability knowledge. I found much of that knowledge through reading and research. It started with Google searches and Wikipedia articles, and it eventually led to half-a-dozen subscriptions to magazines and journals related to the field. It’s incredibly important to keep up-to-date with the industry and with reliability. [Read more…]
Once an ostrich sticks its head in the sand, any risk it might be facing is gone, right? Of course not!
I believe we are living – relative to electric system reliability – with what we call the ostrich effect. Most of us have our heads stuck in the sand. But guess what? The sand is crumbling, and the ostrich is starting to see things; things he can’t hide from anymore. [Read more…]
by Alan Ross
When you start to put a risk and reliability program together for high voltage electrical equipment—primarily transformers—you have to go through a cultural change. I’ve seen it repeatedly, both in the industrial marketplace and the utility marketplace.
It’s never a one-person decision. [Read more…]
by Alan Ross
When you think about maintenance from a reliability perspective rather than an engineering perspective, it becomes clear that transformers are somewhat of a red-headed stepchild, even though they are the heart of the electrical system.
Why? Let’s take a closer look.
by Alan Ross
As VP of reliability at my company, I often meet customers when they are at the tyranny of the urgent. They’ll have a significant problem, multiple questions, and a big decision to make.
Just recently I was with one of our customers as he was facing one of those big decisions. It was a tough one. [Read more…]
by Alan Ross
A few weeks ago I went to a customer site where they had a meeting of the minds for their reliability team. The host was a multi-site paper manufacturer with an intelligent approach to plant reliability. The reliability team included, of course, several reliability professionals, but there were procurement people there too. That’s not unusual. We’re finding more and more that procurement and reliability often work hand in hand. [Read more…]
by Alan Ross
“Why don’t they care?”
“About what?”
“About electrical system reliability?”
“Who says they don’t care?”
“You do. Quite often, as a matter of fact.” [Read more…]
by Alan Ross
So this this a heck of a way to start a blog on reliability, with a picture and video link to what a catastrophic failure of a transformer looks like. If you’ve been in this industry for any length of time you have probably seen it. It is a mess. [Read more…]
By Alan Ross
Back in August of 1987, there was a “convergence” that supposedly marked the movement from one age to a new age, the Age of Aquarius. And for those who are too young to remember, just Google the song. Oh, darn…now it’s in my head! But I digress. (Which you should get used to when reading this blog because I love digression for context.)
What does that have to do with the dawning of the age of IoT? Well, there are actually a lot of similarities. [Read more…]
By Guest Blogger Wesley Suplit, product manager, SDMyers
After my first year in college, I discovered my favorite curriculum – economics. This surprises my friends and family because that discipline is known for its dry content and difficult math concepts. However, I had a completely different and inspiring experience. The course, and, really, my professor, opened my eyes to the beauty of observing how people make decisions.
What rocked my world was how simple economics could be. Conclusions could be inferred simply by observing phenomena and then performing thought experiments related to the observations. The goal of a thought experiment is to explore the potential consequences of the principle in question. Surprisingly, no mathematical formulas or complex equations were needed. [Read more…]
At SDMyers, we can’t stress enough the importance of safety when testing high-voltage electric-power equipment. Our partners at IRISS share our passion for the safety of maintenance workers in the field, including our own mobile diagnostic technicians. We hope that this guest blog from them is educational. If you find value in it, please leave us a comment. And, if you enjoyed this article, then here’s information on the safest way to obtain oil samples from cabinet transformers without de-energizing them. [Read more…]