HV Arrester Manufacturer Secures Quality by Extended Testing in Production

In the electrical industry today, there has been a systematic movement away from dependence mainly on national standards and instead toward reliance on common international standards. The major forces behind this trend have been the growing level of internationalization of this industry as well as the universal drive to reduce costs. Manufacturing electrical components to meet special requirements imposed by various local standards almost certainly results in shorter production runs, less purchasing efficiency and increased unit costs.

Surge arresters too have recently been going through development of more such common international standards-a process that generally combines the input of suppliers, users and independent testing laboratories. However, one of the problems has been that the definitions of how tests are to be performed within these new standards have not always been consistently interpreted. Among the suppliers that have tried to influence this process towards a more uniform type testing is ABB High Voltage Products - one of the worlds’ largest suppliers of arresters for HV applications. INMR visits ABB in Ludvika and reports. on how production of arresters and blocks has been organized around more testing than usually required within the industry.

Goran Torshage, Product Manager for HV arresters at ABB, takes a similar view and explains that the hallmark of the arrester strategy at ABB is to offer extra value through, among other things, higher quality and more reliability. He sees this as the logical business response in a marketplace where customers are demanding more and more. “Being an arrester supplier today is not easy”, he sighs. “For example, there is now a tendency for customers to require longer warranty periods. sometimes up to 1.0 years”. In the face of this trend, Torshage says that ABB is working mainly on quality related issues which impact service performance “We would like the user to realize”.