Standards relevant to transformers – Part VIII
Up to now, we have covered the complexity of dissolved gas analysis and its vulnerability to so many factors.
byP. Ramachandran, A. S. Jhala
Up to now, we have covered the complexity of dissolved gas analysis and its vulnerability to so many factors. Even the transformer users collect the oil sample by an experienced team and perform the diagnoses by the best experts or software health index. It highly depends on the DGA test provider.
In the early days of DGA for the power transformer industry, most DGA tests were performed in laboratories owned and / or controlled by organizations correlated to manufacturing or operating electrical equipment. In our time (2022), most offline DGA tests are performed by organizations focused on oil tests and measurement devices. Transformer maintenance engineers and their financial administrators need to decide if it is worth having their DGA tests or using one of the multiple outsourcing alternatives. Sometimes this decision emerges from the overall politics of the organization – to prefer to outsource, for example – but it has a huge impact on the energy availability both in routine and emergency situations. This situation has been even more emphasized during the pandemic period when outsourcing has highlighted some implications of delivering DGA samples to an external organization.
The majority of technical and financial staff are aware of the quality standards ISO 17025 and ISO 90001, which are mostly compulsory for all transformer oil bids. Quality standards are indeed optimized for the quality control of each organization and, in this case, of oil laboratories.
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