Interview with Ashish Kulshrestha, Vice President – Technology at Qualitrol
Qualitrol has been in business since 1945. Qualitrol serves electric utilities, industrial and oil & gas energy customers globally. Our corporate headquarter is based in...
byTransformers Magazine
Qualitrol has been in business since 1945. Qualitrol serves electric utilities, industrial and oil & gas energy customers globally. Our corporate headquarter is based in Fairport, NY. We have six centres of excellence and manufacturing facilities in US, Canada and UK. We have been steadily increasing our investment in professional manpower evenly spread across our centres of excellence. Recent growth of the power sector in India allowed Qualitrol to develop an aggressive expansion plan by creating a larger center in India. This allows us to offer a holistic end-to-end support infrastructure to our customers in India and South Asia Pacific region.
I joined Qualitrol five years ago. At the time, I had 18 years of power systems experience, mainly in substation automation, protection & control, and large software system integration.
Single-stop solutions for monitoring
Condition monitoring of electrical assets is not a new concept. While offline asset health assessment has been around for 100 years, the introduction of digital relays in 1980s enabled our first attempt at on-line monitoring. Since then, the industry has been evolving with more credible solutions being offered every year. The market place today is crowded with various technology and solution providers in our domain. From small vendors with fewer than 10 employees to multi-billion dollar global organizations, they are all in this quest with us. The industry, even with these crowded offerings has enabled less than 0.5 % of assets globally. As an example, only 1 in 200 power transformers globally have on-line monitoring.
When it comes to generating stations, most customers globally identify rotating machines as the primary asset to monitor. For transmission networks, the choice happens to be power transformers. After two decades of home grown technology development and acquisitions, Qualitrol offers most comprehensive monitoring solutions for both of these assets. While some of our competition have developed credible solutions, none of them offer anywhere close to our comprehensive offerings. In the past decade our software capability has developed to allow integration and consolidation at the asset level, station level or enterprise level for our customers. For example, Qualitrol’s latest solution for transformers includes on-line versions of multi-gas DGA with UHF partial discharge allowing higher probability of identifying a potential problem when compared to IEEE C57.143-2012 standard.
While one may accept this as satisfactory, I often think, what does this mean to our customers?
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