Petrovan, Margareta
SERGI
Oil-filled transformer explosions are due to electrical arcs occurring in transformer tanks. Within milliseconds, arcs vaporize the surrounding oil and the generated gas is quickly pressurized. The pressure difference between the gas bubble and the surrounding liquid oil generates pressure waves, which propagate and interact with the tank. Then, the reflections of the pressure waves build up the static pressure, which rises and leads to the tank rupture since tanks are not designed to withstand such levels of static pressure. This results in dangerous explosions, expensive damages and possible environmental pollution. While protective walls surrounding transformers can contain the explosion and sprinklers can fight the induced fire, the current paper presents a strategy to prevent the transformer tank rupture. Once an electrical fault occurs, the fast depressurization of the tank is induced by quick oil evacuation to a reservoir in order to prevent the tank explosion. To evaluate the efficiency of this strategy, experiments and computer simulations are used. The experiments were performed on large scale transformers equipped with the protection. Besides, simulations of the consequences of an electrical arc occurring in a 200 MVA transformer geometry were run and the pressure maps obtained with and without protection were compared.
