Over the past few years, the plant has experienced several unplanned shutdowns/outages in various areas. You’re a recent hire, and this situation is one of the reasons the plant manager hired you. He doesn’t have much information, but he does know that one feeder lost power because of a cable fault. The plant maintenance staff does not have any qualified electrical testing technicians. The only time the plant uses an electrical testing firm is when one of these outages hits and the cause needs to be determined.
The plant manager wants you to get ahead of this and identify the next (impending) outage/shutdown before it happens. Where do you start?
Simply implementing a testing program probably won’t allow you to predict the next fault, because a testing program needs baseline data to support that purpose. What this really means is you need to start the program now, so you get the payoff over time. Any new cables or equipment would have baseline data in the system, too.
It is possible that a qualified testing firm can point to potential problems that can be addressed. For example, some cables look bad even without trended results.
In parallel with implementing the testing program, you need to survey the plant to look for failure causes. A common problem, for example, is improperly engineered surge protection.
