A New Method for the Aging Evaluation of Oil-Paper Insulation Using η-Butanol and Methanol

To improve the accuracy and efficiency of the aging life prediction and assessment of transformer oil-paper insulation,and to make up for the deficiencies of traditional characterizers,such as 2-furfural,carbon monoxide,and carbon dioxide,a method for the simultaneous determination of methanol,ethanol,n−propanol,and η-butanol in oil with a single injection is established by headspace-gas chromatography-mass spectrometry.The measured results show that the determination limits of the four alcohol characterizers can be controlled to 10μg/kg level.Based on this method,the change patterns of the above four alcohols with thermal aging time and degree of polymerization are obtained through thermal aging experimental research.Ethanol,η-propanol,and η-butanol in oil indicate nearly linear correlations with thermal aging time and degree of polymerization,similar to that of methanol.By analyzing 52 sets of measured data of 500 kV EHV transformers in operation,η-butanol is found to have excellent performance,and a new method to evaluate the aging state of oil-paper insulation employing η-butanol and methanol is proposed along with the aging attention value model.The measured data of 500 kV EHV transformers in operation indicate that the combination of η-butanol and methanol as the preferred characterizers can effectively compensate for the shortcoming of traditional characterizers in the early stages of aging,and the feasibility of the method is verified.Two possible pathways for the generation of η-butanol by cellulose cleavage during the aging of oil-paper are proposed from the chemical structure of cellulose.

Improving the Hydromechanical Deep-Drawing Process Using Aluminum Tailored Heat Treated Blanks

The present work demonstrates the effectiveness of combining the hydromechanical deep-drawing process with the Tailored Heat Treated Blank（THTB） technique. In the hydromechanical deep-drawing process, the fluid pressure is used for postponing the fracture occurrence in the blank, while the THTB technique allows to create a material property gradient through a suitable artificial aging treatment carried out prior to the forming process. Since the number of process variables is large, in the present work the authors propose an optimization loop for the determination of the parameters controlling the extension of the blank regions to be subjected to the aging treatment and the temperature levels to be set during the heat treatment. The proposed methodology couples a simple finite element model（Abaqus） with a multiobjective optimization platform（mode FRONTIER）. A preliminary experimental campaign was carried out for determining the effect of the aging treatment on the mechanical（through tensile tests） and deformative（through formability tests）behavior of the AC170 PX aluminum alloy. Optimization results prove the effectiveness of the adopted methodology and put in evidence that the adoption of properly aged blanks in the hydromechanical deep drawing allows to increase the limit drawing ratio and to simplify the process since it is conducted at room temperature.