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NETWORK / 36 / NOVEMBER 2018 PROTECTION, MONITORING & CONTROL S ubstation monitor- ing has been an area of interest amongst distribution network operators (DNOs) for some time, as the way consumers use and interact with the network changes due to the relatively rapid growth of photovoltaic installations, elec - tric vehicles, domestic-level bat- tery storage and so on. Before these relatively new technolo- gies were widely adopted, it was sufficient to manually record a reading from an analogue maximum demand indicator during a physical inspection once or twice a year, but this is no longer considered sufficient by many in the industry who are now interested in annual and diurnal patterns, harmonics and more. There are a number of com - mercially successful substa- tion monitoring products on the market, but these can take several man hours or more to install and are not as low cost as the market would like. With over 400,000 substations in Great Britain and an expectation that each one will last many decades before replacement, the dominant industry need is for a low cost, easily retrofittable solution. FuseOhm is a low-cost technology designed to address the retrofit substation monitor - ing niche. And it can be fitted in less than three minutes (with no cable connections or wiring re- quired) making it ideal to tackle the large and price-sensitive market for monitoring second- ary distribution substations. The units are designed to fit Accelerating innovation Jeremy Carey, managing director of 42 Technology, highlights the development of new condition monitoring technology and talks about the challenges as an SME of working with distribution network operators (DNOs). surges and so on. PNDC's expertise was also helpful in designing a focused field test programme that addressed the issues most likely to be of con- cern to the intended customer, the DNOs. Although the test window was relatively short due to the high pace of the develop - ment, all the required testing was completed. The tests showed that the units were accurate across a large temperature range, referenced to a high-end Fluke device used as the 'gold stand - ard' and that they survived a wide range of upset conditions including: sufficient current for long enough to blow the fuse, long term exposure at 400 A and fault currents of up to 1600 A for brief periods. The next step, scheduled for this summer, is the first install of a FuseOhm prototype in a customer-facing substation as part of a trial by one of the DNOs. Working with DNOs Getting to the point where there is a prototype interesting enough for a DNO to trial has been an unusual journey for a product development services business like 42 Technology. Typically, clients come to an external consultancy with market insights, challenges and problems – perhaps even a fully developed brief. The external team would then work with the client through a phased development programme of innovation, design, development and test, helping them to secure owner - ship of the arising intellectual in series with the fuse to log cur- rent, voltage and phase angle from each feeder. With the fuse holder being selected as the installation site because it is one of the few areas of substations that is virtually standard across the majority of distribution substations on the island and the fuses are generally easy to access, remove and replace. The patent pending technol - ogy has been conceived, devel- oped to functional prototype level and field tested using a two-stage grant from the Indus- trial Strategy Challenge Fund administered by Innovate UK. Field testing 42 Technology completed the mechanical, electrical and so–ware design in house, then worked with The University of Strathclyde's Power Networks Demonstration Centre (PNDC), near Glasgow to complete the field testing. This provided a safe, independent and accurate means of field testing this type of hardware both in normal conditions and a range of upset conditions, such as over-voltage, high current, fault current FuseOhm has been designed as a low cost, easily retrofittable monitor- ing technology.