Innovative Wireless Monitoring System for Air-Core Reactors – Experience from Field Deployment and Insights for Predictive Maintenance

This paper presents the first successful retrofit installation of a fully wireless monitoring system on operating air-core dry-type shunt reactors. After outlining the motivation and describing fundamental challenges associated with air-core reactor monitoring, the proposed solution is described in detail. Multiple wireless, energy-autonomous sensor nodes acquire and preprocess magnetic field, vibration, sound pressure, and winding temperature data. Extracted parameters are sent to a local data concentrator, where they are stored in a time-series database. Resulting long-term data from 23 consecutive days is presented and interpreted. In the end, first learnings and improvements as well as new future applications are discussed.