Over the past few years, electric utility maintenance personnel have been inundated with test techniques that promise to reduce operating and maintenance costs. Most of these techniques are Condition Based Maintenance (CBM) strategies. CBM techniques add new tools to the engineer’s toolbox, but to many, it sounds like alphabet soup: BOA, DGA, DTA, DCRT to name but a few.

Tony Picagli of United Illuminating will summarize these newer CBM techniques and combine them into a maintenance strategy in the session, “An Approach to Transformer Circuit Breaker Condition Assessment” at the Finepoint Circuit Breaker Test & Maintenance Training Conference. The strategy will best determine the equipment’s condition and allow for “JIT Maintenance,” Picagli said.

Picagli is a principal electric system maintenance engineer at UI (New Haven, Connecticut). His work at UI concentrates on circuit breakers of all classes, gas-insulated substations and standby battery systems. He is active on several Doble Engineering client committees and has been an IEEE member for over 30 years. He earned both his BSEE and MBA at The University of New Haven and is a registered professional engineer in Connecticut.