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Con Edison is testing the Cable Splicing Machine. Supply: ULC Applied sciences
Power and utility firms are turning to robots to enhance reliability, resilience, and employee security. ULC Applied sciences LLC and Con Edison Firm of New York Inc. at this time stated they’ve developed and field-tested a machine to automate the termination of medium-voltage cables.
The brand new prototype Cable Splicing Machine will enable utility employees to enhance the repeatability and consistency of vital connections inside the electrical grid, stated the companions. It will probably automate cable finish preparation whereas minimizing employee publicity to excessive voltages, added ULC.
“At Con Edison, employee security is paramount,” stated Patrick McHugh, senior vice chairman for Con Edison Electrical Operations, in a launch. “The expertise used on this software will allow our employees to splice excessive voltage cables, effectively, uniformly, and, most significantly, extra safely.”
“If you scale back the danger of performing 1000’s of splices every year, enhance their accuracy and effectivity, it advantages employees, grid reliability, value effectiveness, and worth,” he stated. “That’s a win, win, win for Con Edison, its employees, clients, and the trade.”
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ULC designs Cable Splicing Machine to deal with complexity
ULC Applied sciences stated it has developed and commercialized robots, machine studying, and inspection companies to assist vitality and industrial firms restore and preserve their pipelines and significant infrastructure. The Hauppauge, N.Y.-based unit of SPX Applied sciences Inc. claimed that its programs might help clients decrease public disruption, scale back greenhouse fuel emissions, enhance security, and decrease prices.
The brand new Cable Splicing Machine can performing complicated operations on feeder cables in underground vaults, defined ULC. It cited as major drivers the necessity to enhance the security of utility employees, shorten the general feeder outage period to scale back the stress on the grid, and enhance community resiliency.
“That is notably vital as underground distribution feeder outages happen throughout adversarial climate situations equivalent to warmth waves and storms that place vital stress on the electrical grid,” ULC stated. The machine consists of a number of impartial subsystems managed by a centralized processing pc and consumer interface.
“The Cable Splicing Machine might be secured onto the center of an uncut cable within the discipline and makes use of electrical actuators to offer exact coordinated movement alongside the axial and circumferential instructions, together with steady 360-degree operation,” stated Ali Asmari, director of infrastructure operations at ULC. “The machine’s software plate consists of quite a few instruments able to stripping again every layer of the cable to a desired dimension utilizing precision software depth controls.”
With the analysis and growth section full, ULC is working with Con Edison to replace the tooling so it might probably tackle several types of cables sooner than earlier than. A number of auxiliary subsystems can autonomously perform extra steps equivalent to adaptively shorting and chopping the cable, stated the corporate.
Dwell digital camera feeds enable an operator to watch and confirm your entire course of from outdoors the manhole with no bodily human intervention, ULC stated. The corporate gives its expertise by a robots-as-a-service (RaaS) mannequin.
The Cable Splicing Machine consists of computerized options for finishing complicated operations. Supply: ULC Applied sciences
Con Edison conducts discipline trials
Con Edison Firm of New York is a subsidiary of Consolidated Edison Inc., one of many largest investor-owned energy-delivery firms within the U.S., reporting about $16 billion in annual revenues and $64 billion in belongings.
The regulated utility firm gives electrical service in New York Metropolis and New York’s Westchester County. It additionally gives fuel service in Manhattan, the Bronx, and components of Queens and Westchester, in addition to and steam service in Manhattan.
Con Edison and ULC started discipline trials of the Cable Splicing Machine this 12 months. The splicers lowered the machine into the construction after which inserted the cable contained in the machine. It accomplished three autonomous operations to arrange the cable in roughly 25 to half-hour per every section of the medium-voltage cable.
ULC plans to reveal its expertise in Sales space 760 on the upcoming Distributech Convention, which will likely be from Feb. 26 to March 1 on the Orange County Conference Heart in Orlando, Fla.
