Market positioning through technology

Changes bring opportunity Fast-paced changes in requirements for transformers are fuelling a comprehensive evolution affecting the standards, technology, business, market, and in the end, the...

byMSI


Changes bring opportunity

Fast-paced changes in requirements for transformers are fuelling a comprehensive evolution affecting the standards, technology, business, market, and in the end, the people. This was stated in the article Support in technology and market development published in Transformers Magazine, Volume 4, Issue 3, which looked more closely at the evolution of the environment around transformers – the technology and the market.

In this article, we want to delve a little bit more into the technology, but still keeping one eye on the market because they are entwined, and, very importantly, because a balanced development of the technology and the market leads to the optimal growth in terms of dynamics and costs.

Since the market and technology are correlated, following the market we can draw some conclusions about technology. For example, analysing market news we can get a good feeling of where the technology is going. To get a full picture it is necessary to include other sources of information as well, but even looking at market news alone will provide a solid picture of technology trends.

So, the news from the transformers market shows that new materials, components, methods, machines and tools – in one word: new products – are emerging almost on a daily basis. These new products frequently offer a variety of benefits, but a question anyone can ask is: how can I deploy them in my manufacture?

From another point of view, by improving the technology we use, we can improve our market position. To illustrate this, this article will focus on two out of a few pronounced technology trends:

  • Increasing efficiency
  • Increasing (over)loading capacity

What to look at when looking for the solution?

The trend of increasing efficiency is probably the trend with the most pronounced and most comprehensive influence on the technology. Regulations which require higher efficiency for transformers have been introduced in many countries, while in many others this process is ongoing. In order to achieve the required efficiency and stay competitive, transformer manufacturers don’t have many choices. In most cases, the solution is to use a detailed electromagnetic simulation of the transformer, or some of its parts, and analyse the results, which has to lead to an optimal solution. There is a variety of reasons why manufacturers are forced to start using simulation tools. One of them is lack of other traditional tools to calculate all parameters needed for design improvement. Another reason is that the analytical models that the manufacturer previously used are based on the experience with the old portfolio, and therefore are not helpful/applicable outside the domain in which models were developed and tuned. In some cases the manufacturer may be using transferred technology, and therefore not know the limits for the application of the models and the tools, i.e. what is the applicable domain, and so on.

 

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