Oil Reclaiming in High Voltage Power Transformers

Mineral oil is one of the most prevalent wastes generated as a result of economic activities of industrial and transportation enterprises.  Every year the world industry generates about 40 million tons of waste oil, no more than 5% of which is processed. Let us consider the ratio of oil consumption and processing in some countries.  The figures are given in Table 1.

Table 1

Consumption and collection of waste oil in some European countries

As you can see, the attitude to waste oil is different in different countries, but one thing is certain – the potential of recycling and utilization of oil is huge.

One of the possible ways of waste oil occurrence is its operation in high-voltage power transformer equipment.  The quality of dielectric fluid gradually deteriorates, resulting in reduction of dielectric strength, increasing of dielectric loss tangent, pollution with mechanical impurities and water.  In this case, it is necessary either to change the oil or to perform waste oil reclaiming.  Simple change is not a cost-effective approach because in most cases service life of dielectric fluid is not completely exhausted, and in case of appropriate treatment it can continue to be successfully used for its intended purpose.

Oil reclaiming saves valuable petroleum feedstock, areas intended for waste oil storage, as well as funds to purchase fresh product.

GlobeCore offers a unique technology allowing to reclaim insulating oil without de-energizing power transformers. It is implemented in the СММ-R-type plants.  Their use contributes to the reliability and efficiency of electricity-generating equipment performance.

When connecting the CMM-R to operating equipment, it forms a closed loop: contaminated power transformer oil is supplied to restoration and clean oil goes back into the power transformer.  The reclaiming of insulating oil properties is achieved by passing it through a layer of a special sorbent – Fuller’s earth.  It should be noted that this sorbent can be reactivated directly in the plant, which is an advantage of the CMM-R systems.

Thus, GlobeCore oil reclaiming processes can fully restore operating properties of transformer oils to normalized values.  In this case it can help to save money on buying fresh oil, reduce the amount of hazardous waste oil, as well as reduce production space required to store waste oil.  Processing of dielectric fluid takes place directly at a running transformer, eliminating the losses associated with possible electrical outages.