Investing in the future

UltraSense technology is being extended to provide 100% coverage of the outer as well as inner semiconductor interface. Further work is being undertaken to apply the measurement to processes with complex temperature gradients.

Initial Development

UltraSense was first developed by IPEC Ltd. with BICC Erith as the industrial partner. BICC were introducing the manufacture of 500kV XLPE insulated cable and they were very interested to know what was happening during the manufacturing process, within the bulk of the insulation and at the interfaces with the semiconductor.

Subsequent development of the IPEC UltraSense has taken place as a result of specific customer information from Field trials and from their experiences of the manufacturing process. These are detailed in the “Case Studies” page of the website.

New Development

There are currently two development areas for the UltraSense system.

In response to customer demand for 100% coverage of all interfaces and of the insulation, we are developing a version of the product with an increased number of transducers. The current model with 16 transducers gives 100% coverage of the critical interface between the insulation and the inner screen. This project involves an increase in the number of sensors from 16 to 32. In itself this is not a difficult problem. The mechanics , electronics hardware and software are all scaleable to the number of transducers required.

The challenge we face is how to present the information to the end user in an intelligible way A display such as the one shown below is manageable for 16 transducers, however a display for 32 transducers becomes difficult to read with the possibility that critical information may go unobserved.

Similarly for the data analysis, the doubling of the number of cross-sections makes them unwieldy to review and some automated method of stepping to the points of interest is required.

Complex temperature compensation.

The second project is more significant from a technology point of view. However once it is incorporated the changes will be invisible to the end user. We have found historically that the temperature gradients within the polymer of an EHV power cable during manufacture are relatively easy to model. There are however unusual conditions where a more complex form of compensation is required. We are developing a model that takes account of these unusual conditions. This algorithm with continuous measurement of the line-speed, the outer surface temperature of the polymer and the dimensions of the cable will enable us to generate an accurate profile of temperature throughout the polymer. We will also have sufficient information with the input of the actual coincident core diameter to give an estimate of the temperature of the core.