Economic Benefits of Partial Discharge On-Line Monitoring on Sugar Cane Co-Generation Plants

This paper outlines an economical case demonstrating that predicting maintenance actions to prevent electrical generator failures represents a good investment when compared to unscheduled outages of cogenerating plants. The focus is on Sugar Cane Producing facilities. The details of instrumenting such generators with partial discharge sensors that allow on-line and temporary spot measurements, achieved without the need of large investments are also offered. Key specifications of permanent coupling capacitors, aimed at optimizing frequency responses, noise rejection and winding depth sensitivity, are explained while highlighting the small investment when compared to a generator outage. The last section makes also the case for permanent monitoring systems installed on those generators that are posing a high failure risk.