Video: BPM – Product
Breaker Performance Monitor: continuous monitoring of high-voltage circuit breakers from the coil current, so that maintenance follows the breaker's condition rather than a calendar.
AI-generated video. The information must be validated by an Amperis engineer.
See the product page: Dynamic Ratings BPM Breaker Performance Monitor
Video transcript
A circuit breaker spends years doing nothing, and then has to work perfectly in 40 milliseconds. This is how you know in advance that it will. Circuit breakers are the largest single source of substation events, and a breaker that fails to open, or opens slowly, leaves everything behind it exposed to the fault current. The transformer that then fails is often the one that gets blamed. Without continuous monitoring there are only two options,
and neither of them is watching the breaker when it actually operates: a maintenance interval on the calendar, and an offline test that requires an outage. The idea is simple. Every time the breaker operates, capture the waveform of the operation, measure it, and compare it with the one it produced when it was healthy. This is the waveform. It is the current in the trip coil during one operation, and every bend in it is a piece of the mechanism moving. That makes it a fingerprint:
as long as the breaker is healthy, it comes out the same every time. And this is why it is worth having. As the lubrication in a mechanism dries out, the beginning of the waveform is unchanged, but everything after the latch happens later. Nothing has failed yet. But it is now measurably slower than it was, and that is months of warning. From that capture the monitor takes the numbers a breaker is judged on, the ones defined in I triple EC 37.09.
And it does not stop at the contacts. The motor that recharges the spring, the gas that insulates the interrupter, the heaters that keep the cabinet dry: all of them are watched between operations, when nothing is happening at all. The gas deserves a sentence of its own. Rather than waiting for a low pressure alarm, it works out the leak rate from the history, and turns that into the only number anyone really wants: how many days are left.
One monitor covers one breaker, or a breaker with 3 independent mechanisms, or a whole switchgear lineup. And everything it learns leaves the substation the way your systems already expect. Breaker monitoring, from Amperis.
