The Importance of Measurement

The world we live in often revolves around numbers, from the numbers in our bank accounts to the square footage of our homes to the number of cups of coffee we need in the morning. However, not everything is measure in the same units. Pizza’s come in a variety of slices, TV screens are measured in inches, and your cup of coffee holds 10 fluid ounces. Electricity is no different as it is measured by a certain unit; transformers measure the amount of current that is flowing in an electrical grid circuit.

Transformer manufacturers must take a number of factors into account when building a transformer to ensure accuracy. Some of the factors to consider include: burden class/saturation class, temperature, load, physical configuration, rating factor, external electromagnetic fields and many more. The build of an electric transformer is simply a primary winding, secondary winding and a magnetic core. The current flows in the primary creating a current in the second winding through the magnetic core. When both of these circuits are working properly an accurate reading can be produced.

Each country has a different way of measuring current transformers, so manufacturers must pay attention to the transformers destination while building it. The two main units of measurement are IEC 60044-1 (BSEN 60044-1) and IEEE C57.13 (ANSI). It is important to ensure constant electric supply through measurements to ensure we can all carry on with our day to day lives.

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The Power of Electric Transformers

Electric transformers provide a safe way to bring electricity into our homes and power the things that we use in our everyday life. From our televisions to our kitchen appliances these machines convert the volts coming from our outlets to our electrical devices. The issue lies in that electricity is pumped out from power plants in large volumes and need to be converted down in order to be suitable for our electrical appliances. Many phone chargers carry small electric transformers in order to convert the electricity into a safe capacity to our phone batteries.

There are many different types of transformers due to the nature of the application. Zig Zag transformers for example, are a three phase power transformer that has the ability to filter and control harmonic currents and be used underground. The underground systems are useful in order to protect against earth faults.

Zig Zag transformers can offer numerous benefits over other transformers. They tend to be a simplistic design which makes them low in cost and can be easily installed onto existing systems. By keeping neutral currents local, these transformers are able to eliminate the need for large neutral wiring. They also improve the fundamental load current. While they are low cost, another cheaper alternative is the delta-wire transformer. The only issue being that this model is less effective than the zig zag model in some applications due to higher internal impedance.

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The Danger of Solar Flares

Solar Flares are a growing topic among those in the scientific fields; these cosmic storms have the potential to cause a great deal of havoc to our planet. Now the amount of damage that these storms will cause all depends on who you ask. Some say that we could see the end of the world thanks to these solar flare storms others say we won’t see anything more than auroras across the sky.

While these storms are still somewhat of a questionable topic, the fact of the matter is that they carry consequences with them. We may be unsure of the scale of damage these consequences may have, there is no denying that they could cause a big disruption to our everyday life. There have been some minor storms that have already hit earth, but they didn’t result in anything more than auroras across the sky. If these storms were larger power grids, GPS, electric transformers and radio communications may fail.

One electric transformer being knocked out is not that big of a deal, those affected would be annoyed until it was fixed. But if hundreds of these transformers were knocked offline there would be major problems. So for now be glad that these storms have remained small and only provide us with spectacular light shows.

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