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What the heck is Cable Rejuvenation?
If only we could do for humans what we do
for underground residential distribution (URD)
cables. Imagine that as you approached the
end of your life, you could drink a magic elixir
and within a week you could perform at your
peak in every way for another 40 years. That
is precisely what Novinium® brand Ultrinium™
rejuvenation fluid does for URD cables. Your
power utility has another option, it can
replace the aging URD cable with new cable.
The new cable will perform reliably, but
installing it will tear up streets and
landscaping, take a lot longer, squander
scarce world resources, and cost 2 to 5-times
more, which must ultimately be reflected in
your electric rates. Ultrinium rejuvenation is
a safer, faster, and better alternative.
Here is how it works. URD cables connect
each padmount transformer to the next
transformer, typically about 400 feet away.
Skilled technicians open two adjacent
transformers and deenergize the cable in a
way that generally does not affect your power
– usually you will not experience any power
outage. Special fittings are attached to each
cable end allowing fluid to be delivered to the
innermost stranded portion of the cable.
Sometimes there might be a splice in the
cable that must be excavated. Typically a
splice pit is about 4 feet deep, 4 feet wide
and 6 feet long. This is much less disruptive
to landscaping than replacing the entire
cable!
Fluid is then injected at modest
pressures into the cable interior. The fluid
permeates outward into the deteriorated
plastic insulation and begins immediately to
reverse the damage done by years of water
tree degradation. The team then moves on
to the next cable section in the circuit and
repeats this simple process again.
Padmount
transformer
URD cable
(cross section)
URD
We don’t see underground residential distribution (URD) cable. What we do notice are
padmount transformer boxes, which are
spread about every 400 feet throughout the
neighborhood. They are not very attractive
so folks often hide them with landscaping.
That’s not a good idea, because technicians
need unencumbered access.
URD cables
connect each of these boxes one to another
and provide high voltage power to your
neighborhood. Don’t ever try to open one,
but if you did you would see a jumble of
cables (see left inset above). Only highly
trained line personnel can access these
cables … inadvertent contact may result in
electrocution! URD cables (see right inset
above) have aluminum or copper strands
which carry the current and a plastic sheath
around the conductor to insulate the
medium voltage conductor from the ground.
A URD cable becomes unreliable water tree
because of a phenomenon called
water treeing. Water treeing, so
named because of the tree-like
structure when viewed under a
microscope, slowly degrades the
insulation of URD cables until
they become unreliable. When
the insulation of a URD cable fails
the lights go out in the entire URD cable
(microscopic
neighborhood.
cross section)
Cable Rejuvenation continued ...
Rejuvenation v. Replacement
Neighbors,
enjoying salad
for lunch, keep
an eye on the
rejuvenation
team
Replacement is a messy affair. It’s noisy,
costly, unsafe, disruptive to pavement and
landscaping, and unnecessarily strains our
environment. When Novinium rejuvenation
teams are in your neighborhood you may
not notice they were there. Because we are
humans we often do not notice subtle improvements in the quality of our lives. If
you have suffered outages from underground cable failures, you may not notice
that outages are substantially reduced after
the cable has been rejuvenated, but the
careful observer may appreciate the absence
of inconvenience. Nobody can guaranty that
all power outages will cease. Wind storms
may knock trees into power lines miles away
and there are dozens of components that
could fail between you and the power plant.
However, water trees in URD cable are one
of the biggest causes for residential
distribution outages. Rejuvenation is safer,
faster, and better than replacement. We
may not be able to add any years to your
life, but we can reduce your stress and the
stress on our planet.
©Copyright Novinium, Inc. 2008-09. All rights reserved. Novinium®, Ultrinium™, Tailored Injection™,
Tailored Formulation™, Perficio™, N-Rex™, N-Ter™, and Single visit – single switch™ are trademarks
of Novinium. The Novinium® process and materials have patents granted or pending including:
Ultrinium™ sustained pressure injection method (patent pending)
Ultrinium™ formulation optimization injection method (patent pending)
Injection Adaptor (U.S. Patent 7,195,504 and 7,538,274)
Perfectium™ single switch injection (U.S. Patent 7,353,601)
Formulation of Ultrinium™ & Perficio™ components (patents pending)
Formulation optimization (patent pending)
N-Rex™ radial exclusion process for treating long cables (patent pending)
In harmony with the neighborhood
Convenient and less disruptive for me … but
what about the others with whom I share
this planet?
Compared to disruptive
trenching or drilling operations where the
existing cables are abandoned, these
neighbors prefer rejuvenation. The quantity
of fluid used to rejuvenate a cable is about
100 times less than the mass of a new
cable. Since injection was conceived and
commercialized by Novinium personnel over
two decades ago, approximately 30,000
metric tons of aluminum, 7,000 metric tons
of copper, and 11,000 metric tons of plastic
have been effectively recycled – conserving
scarce world resources and reducing the
emissions of carbon dioxide.
A material safety data sheet describing the chemicals and regulatory matters is available online
click on “MSDS” at:
www.novinium.com/solutions.aspx