Predictive maintenance as a key to efficient asset Management

Efficient management and maintenance of electrical assets is a priority for the Red Eléctrica Group and therefore, it relies on the know-how of its experts, cutting-edge technologies and innovative solutions. With this motivation, projects such as the Partial Discharge Platform have been born.

This innovation initiative is based on predictive maintenance, which relies on data analysis to anticipate possible anomalies in order to avoid them, always with the objective of maximizing network availability.

The project’s objective

Partial discharges are little electric shocks which happen at insulated facilities such as wires, certain enclosed points at GIS substations or power transformers. These usually happen right before a fail in these assets.

This way, the expert’s objective from Red Eléctrica and Elewit is developing a pioneer platfotm -which does not exist nowadays- for partial discharges detection and diagnosis.

Keypoints of the project

• The detection of these partial discharges will be done using sensors which will be available for transmission facilities both temporary or permanently, according to the planned strategies.
• On the other hand, thanks to AI, the diagnosing of these partial discharges will be available for classification according to their importance, generating alarms and alerts depending on procedures, optimizing the maintenance department strategies.
• Additionally, these machine learning techniques will allow, thanks to an independent software for monitoring, an action plan designed for detecting and classifying partial discharges linked to previous data.

Who is working on the project?

For the execution of the project, in addition to the Group's professionals, other key players such as Ampacimon -specialists in hardware and software for the monitoring and analysis platform- Piperlab -a company specialised in Artificial Intelligence- and the Laboratorio Central Oficial de Electrotecnia (LCOE) -for the procedures, laboratory simulations and analysis of partial discharges- are also involved.

What is the current stage of the project?

The Partial Discharge Platform is currently in its pilot phase, in which a Minimum Viable Product has been developed. Which consists of demonstrating the ability to identify the type of phenomenon and the potential of artificial intelligence in laboratory tests.

It is estimated that by the end of 2022 the first functional module will be marketable and in 2023 the platform will be finished and fully available, optionally managed from SAGA, the advanced electricity asset management solution developed by Red Eléctrica.