The Thirteenth Day

One of the staffs lost a family member this morning and The Lab members paid a visit to her family's house during lunch break. May Allah grant him a place in Jannah, amin. Let us be reminded that our turn will definitely come so let's make sure that we are well prepared.

One of the most important properties in electrical studies is resistance. It is a measure of opposition to the passage of a steady electric current. Resistance can be calculated using the Ohm's Law, V = IR and is measured in Ohms, taken from the name of the founder, Mr Georg Simon Ohm.

Georg Simon Ohm

(1789-1854)

Thank you Mr Ohm for the great discovery, because of you I got to study what I'm studying now, seriously. To be continued..

The Twelfth Day

Being an engineer is not all about doing reports, researches, and technical stuffs. You do other things as well. Bad introduction. I knew you are going to say that because I kind of agree, sadly. Anyway today, I was given the opportunity to write a tender about purchasing a new microscope for The Lab. Actually, the tender is almost complete. All I need to do is to add things that I think necessary and do some editing here and there. So you did almost nothing? Hey! at least I learned something.

The challenge is that in a tender, you cannot state the brand or model that you want but instead you have to specify the specifications of the microscope and this requires knowledge on the subject which I don't have any, heh. So I spent quite a while reading about microscopes, their functions, and their usages. Hopefully I'm still there when the new microscope arrives.

Microscope brochures to be read

The Eleventh Day

Let me start with the morning assembly, locally known as The Monday Buzz. It began with a doa, followed by a short upper body exercise, then a pledge reading ceremony by the employees. It was the management turn this time. After that there's a talk on the green technology unit, tips on e-mail tracking, and a video about fuel cell technology, which is 3 times more efficient than a conventional gasoline engine. At least that is what I managed to remember. The assembly ended with everyone singing "the song of the day", which is this song. I chose that because it has the highest views among other videos with the same title, heh.

Wow, that's quite a lot. I should do this every Monday! I still haven't received my specific assignment yet so until then, I won't be writing about my daily activities since it's just the same as the previous days. Now I present you, a random picture of TNBR to end my post.

The path to The Lab

The Tenth Day

The tenth day. A new entry with just an hour gap? Well, I'd feel bad if I didn't do an update for all the days that I came to work. The day is Friday, and Friday seems to end sooner than any other workdays, heh. So what? Give me a break. I'm out of ideas, and pictures as well. Wait, there's still one:

The Very Cosy Meeting Room

This is where the cable team have their meetings and discussions. The meetings are usually small, you can tell from the number of chairs there.

Hmmm. Nothing much happened on this day, other than helping the team with their research data and going around The Lab looking for things to be looked at. Several staffs just came back from outstation, and several others will be outstation-ed next week. It is a common thing in The Lab. There's always people that went outstation, which also means that there's always unoccupied seats for me, yay! A picture to end this post:

TNBD and TNBR working together

The Ninth Day

You missed the updates for the last 2 days! What!? you can start a thread now??! I can do whatever you can do. Okay, this is going to be.. troublesome. Anyway, that is what weekends are for! To do things that you aren't able to do on the weekdays! Nonsense. Whatever. Note to self: Do not baring2 kejap before updating the blog. Back to cables. Remember XLPE cable from the last entry? This is how it looks like:

The white thing surrounding the copper conductor is the XLPE material. Why XLPE is more preferable? It has high electrical and mechanical strength, high aging resistance, environmental stress resistance, anti-chemical corrosion, easy to be constructed, and can withstand higher temperature. XLPE is so cool! I know, right.

But then again, XLPE cable are also prone to failures. 2 types of common failures are partial discharge which I have briefly covered and water tree. A tree made from water? Wrong. It is a diffuse structure in the XLPE resembling the shape of a tree and is formed and grow in the presence of moisture, impurities, and electric field over time. In The Lab, this is how they investigate water trees in cables:

The XLPE insulator is first separated from the cable and put into the green machine to be sliced. The sliced XLPE will be put in a water bath at a certain temperature, together with a colouring substance to make the water tree more visible, if there's any. Credit goes to The Colleague for the information. After that, it will be cut into pieces before being observed by using a microscope.

Observation in action!

The picture in the red box above is taken from somewhere without permission. Hahaha. Not funny. It shows 2 types of water tree. Water tree is fatal because once they are big enough, they will bridge the insulation system, causing the cable to fail as shown by 'leakage tree'. The pictures in this entry is actually taken on The Eighth Day but since there's nothing eventful that happened in this day, I just need to put something, heh.

Moving on to the tenth day!

The Eighth Day

Before I proceed with today's event, let me share something about cable insulations. Insulators are materials that do not conduct electricity or resist current flow and can be in a form of solid, liquid, or gas. Insulators protect you from the danger of high voltage and the conductor from environmental factors. In Malaysia, modern high-voltage cables have XLPE insulators, which stands for Cross-Linked Polyethylene but there are still cables with oil insulators.

So today, I followed the technicians to take oil samples from this oil-filled cables. The samples are then sent to the lab to be analyzed for moisture content, dissolved gases, and impurities. This information will tell us about the condition of the cable and also the insulator itself. The process of the oil sampling will be summarized in the pictures below.

The oil tanks that provide continuous flow of oil

to the cables

The tube that connects the cable to the tank is bypassed

Sample taking in action!

The oil used is mineral oil or liquid petroleum. As you can see, it is colourless. An amazing application of the oil that I found, not related to cables unfortunately. Computer enthusiasts, this might interest you:

No cooling fans = less power consumption + no sound + no dusk.

Awesome? Definitely.

The Seventh Day

Seventh is such a cool word. Try repeating it many times. Seventh, seventh, seventh, seventh. Loudly this time! Seventh, seventh, seventh, seventh. It is so beautiful that it sounds like music to my ears. Dude, you're crazy. Excuse me, did anyoneone say something? Grrr... Oh well, let's proceed.

Finally, the 5S inspection day! The auditors were saying positive words for the big improvements that they made to the lab and I think they are going to get great marks this time. The results will be announced in the next morning assembly. Let's hope for the best! go go cable group! The 5S corner:

Also today, a group of people from Kenya paid a visit to the place or the cable lab, which will be called The Lab from now on. The Boss is explaining to them about the projects there and the cable samples on the table. They barely looked at my direction so I only managed to get this kind of picture.

What did I do? I helped one of the technical assistant to do a powerpoint report on the PD and IR tests that the cable group did last week in the KL area, refer to The Visit #1 for more information. The data obtained from the tests is processed by using this special software and this makes the life of the cable people much easier. This report is very important to the client, TNBD which will determine that which cables need to be replaced immediately, need to be rechecked in the near future, or do not require any major concern. It seems like I keep changing places everyday. My workstation for today:

Tomorrow? who knows. Later!