Grant: Engage Grants Program

Powertech Labs Inc. has been at the forefront of research for separating, monitoring and studying byproduct compounds produced from mineral oil to assess and prolong transformer health. With a continually aging infrastructure and the high cost of obtaining new transformers, there is a need for novel methods to accurately and economically assess transformer equipment health. The age of transformer oil has been characterized using methods such as acidity tests and new chemical techniques: determination of relative content of dissolved decay products by spectrophotometry, solid suspension by turbidimetry, Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, and electrical diagnostic techniques. These traditional methods are tedious, slow, and less specific. The goal of this research is to age synthetic and naturally based ester oils with and without the presence of paper in order to characterize both the type and quantities of compounds which may be a result of different faults using sensitive and rapid technique of capillary electrophoresis coupled to ultraviolet detector and/or mass spectrometer. Additionally, aging and testing ester-based oil containing small, varying amounts of mineral oil residue will be performed under various fault conditions to determine the formation of potential marker products caused from the contamination. Liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC/MS) would also be investigated to characterize the ester oils and the potential marker products derived from contamination.