Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Raw power

The last post interested Lord Uber-Blogger James Higham. Developing the theme, I mentioned that you can't just turn off high voltages. This very short clip demonstrates very vividly that this is really the case.


Also, when things go wrong, the larger sub-stations can be very dangerous indeed. This is apparently a fuse failing but rather too slowly for comfort. Note the hot metal dripping onto the ground.


...and this is a substation exploding due to sustained overload causing catastrophic failure.

I had seen the last video used as an argument against BT's new 21CN IP network handling telemetry for the Electricity Generating Companies- the additional delays introduced (only in the order of hundreds of Miliseconds) have potentially disastrous consequences in fault conditions.

You can find out more detail about these videos by following the YouTube links.
There are rather a lot of unpleasant high voltage accidents on YouTube, I wouldn't recommend rooting around too deeply.

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