My Projects

T. V. Oommen

 

Introduction

Transformed Chemist

Transformer Doctor

Hydrophobia

Life Extension

Thunderbolts

Bubbles Fun?

Hydrogen Generator

Sunflowers

R&D 100 Award

Going Public!

Concluding Remarks

Pictures

 

Introduction

 

If you have gone through ‘My Life Bits’ already, you will notice that I am continuing with my life story in a different way. Here I give details of my Industry Research (having already described my academic research). For many of you this many not be appealing because it contains technical matters that few are familiar with.

 

So what shall I do? I’ll try to make the description of the projects as human as possible. Secondly, I’ll try to relate the projects that reveal some connection to your daily lives.  You’ll learn of the challenges in research as well as the rewards. You may or may not be in an R&D career, but may be curious, ‘What does a Researcher do?’ You will find some answers to that here.

 

Basic research, as I had pointed out earlier, is important but companies prefer to fund applied research which can not only pay for the investment but also generate new income. Industrial firms and pharmaceutical companies stake billions of dollars to develop new products and new cures.

 

Once I got into Industry, all my research was applied research. The projects came from the need to develop new and improved products as well as solving critical problems.

 

I Became a ‘Transformed Chemist’

 

I joined the Electrical Manufacturing Industry in 1977, but my job was related to just one type of electrical equipment: the Transformer. Most of you have seen one in your neighborhood on the ground or on poles. These provide the line voltage necessary to run our home electrical systems and gadgets. Occasionally you may have seen much larger units in substations where a lot of mysterious looking items are found. We are afraid to go near them, and we should be. They carry very high voltages. The heart of a substation is a large transformer; actually there could be several in a substation.  The high voltage power lines you see overhead carry very high AC voltage for long distances, but where does the high voltage originate? The answer is, from a  Generator which could be hydroelectric, coal fired station and so on. The typical voltage produced is 2,500  volts, and a step-up transformer or a series of such raises the voltage to as high as 800,000 volts (800 kV).

 

I just happen to be posted at the world’s largest Power Transformer Plant  as a Development Engineer. I was a Chemist in an electrical world. What was I going to do, especially in electrical research? As I had mentioned above, it was not my choice. I had to take whatever came my way when I desperately needed a job. Of course, I sounded to my employer eager to take the offer so that I could do some useful work there.

 

Talk about timing!  I was at the right place at the right time. They had no chemists there in the Plant, and they thought they never needed one. There was a chemical engineer  who took care of the processing machinery. My boss, the Development Engineering Manager, had started a Materials Lab a few years ago with a technician who had a B.S. degree in Biology who was really smart in venturing to other fields. There was also a high voltage electrical testing lab with technicians. Mechanical strength testing was introduced to test the strength of paper and pressboard materials that were used in transformers. A large power transformer looks like a big beast with horns (the bushings), but inside it is a huge iron core and coils which are made of copper conductors wrapped with paper tape; heavy pressboard barriers and support structures are also inside. A transformer either steps up or steps down voltage, and for this two coils are needed, one with larger number of turns, and the other with fewer turns. The transformer works on the principle that when current flows through one of the coils, the other coil which is not connected to it automatically becomes a current carrying coil; If this coil has fewer turns, it will have a lower voltage. If this coil is connected to the line, the transformer will act a s a step down transformer.

 

That’s not all. The transformer should not have anything that leaks away power. Even air would be a conductor at high voltages. So the interior of these transformers is filled with an insulating fluid which also acts as a coolant because transformers generate heat.

 

Over long period the paper insulation and the oil would deteriorate and weaken the electric strength. Beyond a point, the deterioration could be too much for safe operation. A normal transformer is supposed to work continuously for 30 to 40 years. The only item that is periodically changed is the insulating fluid. Petroleum based ‘transformer oil’ is the most widely used fluid. It is electrically pure and has high electric strength. Several billions gallons are used worldwide in transformers.

 

Besides normal aging of the insulation, there are abnormal aging conditions resulting from fault conditions. Any internal shorting, moisture and air, abnormal electric stress etc could be responsible. External conditions such as storms, especially thunderstorms can knock down a transformer, and you all know the consequences: power loss. The electric utilities try to replace damaged transformers as  quick as possible to restore power.

 

So you should be somewhat interested in my transformer related research. My job was to make the transformer more reliable, and to detect fault conditions before they occur. Also, once  failures  and problems occur, I need to solve the mystery. My work with large transformers was particularly important because I was trying to keep those units working properly for millions of people who needed electric power. Only when you  read  about some of the projects I did you will appreciate what the impact of some of my research is. Let us begin one thing at a time.

 

Transformer ‘Doctor’

 

Whoever heard of transformer doctors?  These are people who diagnose transformer faults and prescribe remedies.

 

At the Plant where I started to work, they were making million  dollar worth transformers for substations. They need to handle very high voltages close to half a million volts, and this puts extra demands on their construction. Heavy insulation barriers, extra dryness and so on are needed. After building each unit a rigorous testing protocol is followed. If it fails in any one of those tests, the unit has to be reworked or the problem corrected.

 

One of the ways the condition of the unit could be tested was to test a sample of oil taken from the unit and test it in the lab for any unusual gases dissolved in it. These gases, if present, would indicate some overheating or electrical discharges. The gases are produced by the degradation of the paper/oil  insulation which produces under fault conditions hydrocarbon gases (from petroleum oil), carbon oxides (from paper) and hydrogen (from electrical discharges). It is possible to identify the type of fault by dissolved gas analysis or DGA as it is called.

 

The DGA technique had been introduced a few years ago, but factories had not started using it.  Before I was hired they had purchased the equipment for gas analysis, an analytical instrument called gas chromatograph (GC). An electrical engineer was trying to set it up, but he did not make much progress. It was at that point I came to the Plant, and I set the GC up because it is a chemical instrument. I also setup a gas extractor because the dissolved gas has to be first extracted from the oil before it  can  be analyzed by the GC. The honest truth  is, I had never operated a GC; my Ph.D. and postdoc work never needed a GC. Yet, after some reading I was able to set it up. Here is the irony: I had worked for two months in a Mining lab, and they had a GC there. The supervisor there would not let me touch it though I had the highest technical qualification there. He had a technician whom he had trained, and no one else was to touch the GC. There was more to it than I care to say.

 

To the engineers I became a Star. In the factory color brochure I became the centerfold with my color picture of doing gas analysis. I had not only job security but also some bargaining power which I did not forget to use. That is how I became a Senior Engineer there in a few years, a position reserved

normally  for true engineers with a lot of experience.  I was allowed to even publish papers and go to technical conferences, something not done before. Ever since, I have continued those activities. Travel was always fun for me and I made sure I saw the sights in each place I visited. I was not going to wait till retirement or vacations to go to places.

 

Anyway, I gave valuable advice on transformers that ran into problems, and proved how valuable the lab could be. I wrote a technical brochure on gas generation from fault conditions  which became a valuable brochure for the engineers.

 

Hydrophobia: Do Not Get Wet!

 

Water is not Friend, but Enemy No. 1 for transformers. Water is not an insulator, but a conductor, and water absorbed in the paper and oil could cause almost an instant failure of a transformer. So every effort is taken to keep water out of it. But in spite of the best efforts to keep a transformer dry, excessive moisture can be present under certain conditions.  A  routine oil sample test could reveal excessive moisture in the oil, and indirectly in paper in contact with the oil, but someone needs to go to the transformer in the field or substation and take a sample and bring it back to a testing lab. Electrical tests also can reveal moisture, but is not practical when the transformer is operating.

 

These days the electrical utilities want to monitor critical units in substations, the priority being given to generator step-up units, particularly those in nuclear power stations. They would like to attach on-line sensors to monitor gas generation, temperature, and so on. I did work on an on-line gas  sensing device for a while but it had to be abandoned later on because the sensing device was not performing well. There are now other devices in the market.

 

I pioneered on an On-line Moisture Sensor  which became a success. What I did was to test some humidity sensors already available for air humidity. No one thought these could be used in oil. I found a few that worked in oil, and the manufacturer of the device was quite surprised. I had already worked on moisture related issues in transformers and had published some original papers. After I had researched on the moisture sensor, additional software  enabled me to remotely monitor moisture in oil in operating transformers. However, my Company decided to give away the technology free to a Partner, and some other companies secretly took the sensor technology and made their own devices. The only thing I have is my publications on it. They all got it free! I tried to patent it, but our patent lawyers did not favor it.

Anyway, I am proud of the sensor I developed.

 

Life Extension: What Everyone Wants

 

Large transformers are worth several million dollars a  piece. Would you like them to fail after just a few years? No. You want to use them for long periods, say 30 to 40 years.

 

There are many thousands of aged transformers operating out there, and one by one they will stop working; death is inevitable for transformers too.

But preserving the life, and even extending it are feasible goals. A lot of the technical presentations I hear these days are on this subject. Even I give such presentations, and consult on it.  There are service groups that evaluate the condition of aged transformers (only expensive ones) and advise the utilities which ones are risky. They check the operational history from the records, check the insulation structure and so on to assess the condition.

 

One of the most decisive tools in diagnosing the condition of paper insulation is by a measurement called Degree of Polymerization (DP). This is a number that represents the molecular chain length of the cellulose polymer that makes up paper. You don’t need a microscope to do this!  All one has to do is to dissolve a sample of the paper in a special solvent (you have no idea what solvent would dissolve paper, but there is a purple colored solution which is a complex of copper and an organic compound, ‘cuprethylenediamine’ (don’t bother to memorize this!). Once you dissolve it with some effort, the solution is run down through a capillary tube, and the running time between two marks is measured. You also find the running time of the pure solvent. That’s all. A special glass tube called the Viscometer is used for this. From the running times you can compute the chain length using some mathematical relationships worked out by researchers.

 

I got familiar with the DP technique as soon as I got my new job because my technician was already using it. But I used it for investigations and wrote the first paper on it for the electric industry in America. My 1981 paper was presented at the Electrical Insulation conference, a bi-annual event. This conference used to select outstanding presentations and videotape them for later use as teaching material. Because my presentation was not only informative but was also done well, they selected mine for that year. This tape is still available for anyone to rent from IEEE (the technical organization of Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers). I took my membership in 1981, and in 1991 became a Senior member.

 

I have done some research projects combining the DP technique with others. One problem with the DP technique is that it is not possible to take a paper sample from an aged transformer while in operation. Even when it is shut down, one cannot go inside. Only when units are repaired one has access to those  paper wrapped coils.

 

In the 1990s and even earlier some researchers had found that paper degradation would produce some minute quantities of chemicals called furans which are intermediate products of decomposition. They aged paper in oil and measured the DP and furanic content of oil, and came up with correlation charts. These charts were immediately hailed as the solution to the problem of direct paper sampling. However, my research showed that there are several complicating factors. Others have started realizing it too.

 

Thunderbolts in Transformers

 

You heard it right! I am talking about thunderbolts inside transformers that cause it to fail, not thunderbolts from thunderstorms, though they can also hit transformers. The first instance of such an event happened in USA in 1982 in Texas. At east this was the first documented case.

 

No wonder there was panic; not only was power knocked off for a wide area, but fire damage was extensive in the substation. No one knew the cause. The transformer was only a few years old and was performing well. There were no thunderstorms or other bad weather.

 

My Company was notified because it was our Company’s product. We had an obligation to investigate. However, only post mortem inspections could be done. The insulation structure did show marks of electric discharge tracks.

 

The Japanese had reported in the 1970s some transformer failures from what they called static electrification. Inside the transformer ‘thunderbolts’ were produced by oil flow in the insulation structure. The friction of the oil with the paper would cause charge separation, and the paper would become negatively charged, the oil positively charged. This is what happens when we walk on a carpet: charges are separated, and we acquire one type of charge, and subsequently when we touch a door know we get a shock. Thunderclouds are electrically charged because falling water droplets rub the air and charge is separated (by removal of electrons). When the charge accumulation becomes excessive, there will be a massive discharge  which we call thunderbolt or lightning. The purple color we see is the discharge in the air medium.

 

I happened to get involved in static charge problem in transformers at least two years before the Texas failure. That time we had an incident of static electrification in transformers at the Plant. A number of large units filled with oil had been stored outside ready for shipping. Someone would periodically turn on the pumps for oil circulation. One night the operator heard some discharge noises and reported it to the management. The next morning the engineers rushed to the units and detected with their meters electric charge generated. Only half of the dozen or so units showed the charging phenomenon. My boss, the Development Manager, soon got involved. What was he going to do? He was aware of the Japanese problems, and had even authorized a research project involving the study of the charging properties of oils. Not much came out of it. That was just a year before I was hired, and the research had been done in the Central lab.

 

There was no time to waste. Static charge was no more a curiosity, but a threatening event!  Since we had the Materials lab I went with the technician to collect oil samples from the units. The Japanese had found that some oils are high charging. We didn’t have a device to test charging property of oils. We devised a crude setup: force-filter oil through a metallic funnel and measure the voltage developed on the funnel. By this device we ascertained that those units which had discharges had a higher charging oil than those without discharges.

 

I had to do some detective work to find out what oils went to the units. There were two types, and one type was high charging. We contacted the oil supplier who told us their oil was perfectly all right.  Their oil had met all the known criteria for transformer oil. But there was no standard developed for charging property of oil, and there was no device either to test this property. The failed Texas unit had the same high charging oil. In order to prevent further field failures from static charge my Company advised all utilities to replace the high charging oil.

 

But before doing that we had to come up with a reliable test device. Our literature search revealed that the US Naval research lab in Washington, DC had been testing jet fuels for charging tendency using a device called the Exxon Mini-Static Tester. So I immediately visited the lab (I remember I almost lost my flight from Indianapolis because I was unaware of the time change) and saw how they tested jet fuel. There had been some explosions when jet fuel was transferred through hoses, and the lab researcher was trying to find the cause and remedy. It was a simple device. The fuel was forced through a half inch wide filter paper circle encased in a metal holder screwed on to the tip of a large syringe (50 ml) at a certain rate. Electric charge produced on the filter was measured using an electrometer, and the  ‘charging tendency’ was estimated. I returned to my lab and made a similar device, but used a filter paper closer to the paper used in transformers, and made other improvements. This Mini-Static Tester has become the standard testing device worldwide because of its simplicity and repeatability. I have still the ‘Model-T’ with me.

 

Our lab performed many hundreds of charge measurements, evaluating all the new oils as well as oils from field transformers in order to advise which oils were good and which ones bad. We discontinued immediately our oil supplier whose oil was high charging, and this supplier later on went out of business. I shall tell you later more about high charging oils.

 

Back to the Texas transformer failure. Two weeks before the failure I was presenting a technical paper on static electrification properties of transformer oil based on our in-house research. The meeting (IEEE) was sponsored by Texas Utilities and was in Dallas, but none from TU attended my presentation because it was not of much interest to them. The presentation was on Thursday and many people had left.

 

After the failure, the TU folks rushed to read my paper, and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) in Palo Alto, CA  which conducts major research for the utilities also approached me, and offered funding for an immediate project. I was thrilled on the one hand, but was somewhat overwhelmed because this was no mere child’s play. The project had set definite goals such as finding the cause of static electrification and providing remedies.  I was somewhat encouraged because of the prior study done at our R&D Center, and I had the report with me.

 

The next three to four years was busy for me. I had to undertake different studies, some using the mini-static tester, and others needed the use of a real flow system which could generate electric charge sufficiently high to cause visible discharges (this I had to build with help from others). I also had to attempt isolation and identification of the charge producing contaminant. Every quarter I had to give an update presentation to the EPRI Advisors and issue a quarterly report.

 

As I started my work, EPRI gave contracts also to universities such as MIT and RPI on static electrification. So the quarterly meetings had professors from these prestigious universities also making presentations, most of which were filled with academic jargon and mathematical exercises. I was initially lost, but later on I grasped what they said. The high voltage physics they used  was impressive but did not really help understand the static charge mystery in transformers.

 

My flow system assembled with help from experts enabled me to develop high voltage in a paper tube from oil flow and study the charge development at different flow rates and temperatures.  I was able to develop as much as 160,000 DC volts on a two feet long tube, at which point it started to discharge with sparks. This was real exciting to watch in a dark room where you felt the whole atmosphere charged. I told my EPRI advisors to come and witness, but none showed up! So they missed the most exciting part of the tests.

 

The other part of my research was to identify the charge producing contaminant.  Though I used every available analytical technique, the contaminant could not be identified. There was evidence it was a polymer and not a simple substance. Polymers in trace quantities do not really ‘dissolve’ in oil, but remain as colloidal suspensions, and escape the usual detection methods.

 

However, I found out what the ‘Gremlin’ that eluded us was by a real detective work. It turned out that an organic adhesive had one component that had a high charge producing polymer, and this adhesive had been used on the paper insulation on the outside. The exact polymer was identified not by analysis but by  examining  each component of the adhesive. This polymer was replaced with another polymer which was low charging. The EPRI sponsors did not have the benefit of this knowledge, and my final report does not give this information. Years later I did publish a technical paper on the polymer that produced high static charge.

 

It turned out that the ‘high’ charging oil we had condemned at first was bad only because it had more ‘dissolving power’ of the polymer than the ‘low’ charging oils.

 

The wide awareness of static electrification all over the world helped in taking preventive measures, and we find that failures from static electrification are considerably reduced. The use of low charging oil, lower oil flow velocities and the starting of pumps in a sequence rather than all at once are the major measures taken.

 

I have authored or co-authored a dozen technical papers on static electrification.

 

Bubbles May be Fun in Champagne, but Not in Transformers…

 

So wrote Dierdre Rafferty Cullen, a professional engineer in her one page article in the ‘Engineer’s Notebook’ column of the magazine, Electrical World, Nov/Dec 2001 issue. Reading further down you see that she quotes me several times, and finally reproduces a remarkable graphical plot that appeared in my technical paper on Bubble Evolution in Transformers that had been presented at an international IEEE conference in later October of the same year. I must say that Dierdre had consulted me on this article which was her idea, and I never knew her in person. She tracked me down! When the article was published, she was unaware of it, but though I do not get the magazine, I got an e-mail from of my old colleague in Westinghouse who was in a different Company in Wisconsin. Dierdre had given my Company e-mail address at the end of the article, and as soon as my friend got the magazine and turned the pages he saw my name and address. It was like a reunion after many years! I tracked down a copy of the magazine soon after.

 

Yes, bubbles are No-No in transformers. Bubbles are pockets of gas and vapor, and they have much lower electric strength. Their presence in the oil-filled equipment would be hazardous because they would initiate discharges.

There are several ways bubbles could be generated, and over my long association with transformers I am aware of all the major sources. Some have to do with improper processing and oil filling of transformers whereby all the air has not been removed. Certain oils known as ‘gassing oils’ are prone to gassing and bubble generation. Another source is the phenomenon known as supersaturation. This is not unlike what happens in a soda can which is pressurized with carbon dioxide. When we open the lid, the excess pressure  is relieved, and the gas comes out of the soda as a profuse stream of bubbles.

 

Many transformers have a gas space above the oil, and during warm-up more of the gas would dissolve in the oil because the gas space is compressed. Later on, when the unit is cooled down, the gas space expands and the pressure is lowered. But the excess gas in oil does not immediately return to the gas space. Depending on the ‘negative’ pressure in the gas space, a stage could be reached that the slightest disturbance of the oil could release gas bubbles.

 

While the above sources of bubbles were known for many years, only in the last twenty-five years a new mechanism of bubble generation has been recognized. During summer months the electric utilities have to overload the transformers, particularly the large ones to meet the energy demands. This overloading causes a sharp and sudden rise in the conductor temperature of the transformer. The paper tape wrapped around it would be heated up suddenly. This has the effect of releasing water vapor which becomes bubbles. Once this possibility was demonstrated, the utilities have been concerned about overloading. EPRI funded a project in the late 1970s on this, and General Electric researchers in their Transformer Division undertook the study. After several years, they came up with a mathematical formula to predict the bubble evolution temperature, and hence the extent of overload, from quantities such as the gas content of the oil and water content of the paper. They conducted minimal experimental work in the critical area, and thought they had sound arguments. They considered that a gas saturated system would produce bubbles much sooner than a gas-free system because there was already plenty of gas available in the former, and only a slight heating would be needed to supply enough water vapor to produce the bubbles. According to their formula, a gas-saturated system could produce bubbles as much as 50oC lower than gas-free systems. This was a scary conclusion because there are a lot of high gas content oil-filled transformers out there. Yet, they don’t seem to fail any more than gas-free units from routine overloads. The EPRI advisors were skeptical, and they funded another study on bubble generation from overload using models that resembled actual transformers. This project was given to Westinghouse transformer researchers. For a while my colleagues were conducting the initial phases of this study, but they were getting nowhere. So I was given the  full responsibility for the study. I had very capable electrical technicians who constructed these models and tested them under overload conditions. These models were encased in large glass test vessels so we could watch the bubbles. Like a patient in a hospital, the model had been connected with so many wires and sensors and monitors to follow temperature and pressure variations and the initiation of bubbles. We had to make sure the current rose sharply in the coil windings. Each coil model had to be discarded after each experiment, so many coil models had to be used. We observed bubble formation at a certain temperature, but this temperature would be different for different experimental conditions such as pressure, moisture in the paper, gas in the oil etc. Finally I had a sizeable data on bubble generation temperatures under different pressure, gas and moisture levels. I noticed that gas saturated and low gas models had almost the same bubble evolution temperatures providing the moisture was not excessive. This completely overthrew the findings of the previous researchers.

 

I was able to fit all the data using a complex mathematical formula for bubble evolution temperature based on three variables. It was just a fit, and could not be derived, though the major part of my formula had some connection with a previously known formula derived from experimental charts known as Piper Charts. However, this connection was not immediately obvious to anyone. I dare say that even the best computer out there would not be able to fit all my data into a formula. I feel fortunate that I got this fitting because the formula can be used to predict the bubble evolution temperature under a variety of operating conditions. The electric utility will be able to use this formula as soon as it is incorporated into one of the Standards on Loading of Transformers. I happened to belong the Committee that revises the Standard  which had adopted the previous erroneous formula.

 

If you are mathematically minded, let me give you the formula that I came up with:

 

     T (oK) =  [6996.7/(22.454 + ln W – ln P)] – [exp (0.473W) x (g/30)1.585]

 

where  T is the bubble evolution temperature in degrees Kelvin (which is oC + 273); W is the percent water content in the paper, P is the external pressure which affects the bubble, and g is the percent gas content in the oil. The ‘ln’ means ‘natural logarithm’ and the ‘exp’ means ‘exponential’  You may try to solve this formula by inputting values for these variables and get the value of T. Go back to your math books on some of these!  All the data points fall within two curves, one for gas free and the other for gas saturated systems.

 

As I had stated at the beginning, I was able to publish a comprehensive paper on my findings in October  2001, seven years later than I had wanted to. The reason for the delay was that though I had submitted my paper much earlier, the referees rejected it for some reason or other, and I found it difficult to change their mind. Later on I understood the reason. These referees belonged to the ‘club’ that had published the erroneous results!

Finally, one by one all of them retired and got out of the way, and in October 2000 I got my first opportunity to give an invited presentation before the Committee that is responsible for Transformer Loading Guide revision. It was with the approval of this committee that I was able to present my paper the next year. So patience and perseverance pay off!

 

Don’t you think I had Fun with bubbles in Transformers? After all, I was trained as Chemist. And ‘Chemists have Solutions’, as they say.

 

The Unexpected Hydrogen Generator

 

These days researchers are trying to develop Fuel Cells which use hydrogen gas to generate electric power. Did you know the best source of hydrogen is not water, but natural gas? Producing hydrogen from water would need electric power to be used, so it does not make sense.

 

I accidentally came upon a ‘hydrogen generator’  which probably would never be used commercially. This ‘generator’ is a bundle of coated steel pieces stacked to some height and heated in a tank of transformer oil. If you put one piece you would not notice any hydrogen, even if that piece is large.

I figured out that the thin film of oil between the steel plates decomposes differently from bulk oil heating. The latter would break down the hydrocarbon chain and produce smaller hydrocarbons such as found in natural gas (produced by heat from petroleum in nature). The steel surfaces seem to pull away the hydrogen atoms and attach them to the surface, later on releasing as hydrogen gas. This observation solved a great mystery in transformers. Some large power transformers were producing hydrogen which  normally  comes from electrical faults, yet we knew there were no such faults. We had to find the source, and a lab experiment finally revealed the source as described above. It was generated from the several feet stack of steel laminates that form the transformer iron core. The core got overheated, and that caused the hydrogen generation. This was Problem Solving. I published a paper on it in a prestigious Paris conference in 1998. The whole electrical world learned of it.

 

Sunflowers and Transformers

 

You are now entering a fascinating landscape filled with sunflowers. But what has it to do with transformers? A few years ago I gave a fun ‘lunch seminar’ at my Company with the above title. I had famous paintings of Sunflowers by Van Gogh and Claude Monet on display; I had vases and soap dishes and so on painted with sunflowers; I wore a hat with a sunflower on it.  Yes, I was trying to entertain my audience  which consisted of engineers, managers and secretaries. I had to make everyone happy.

 

But there was some serious stuff in my presentation too. I was having a new project which  was aimed at using vegetable oils in transformers instead of petroleum oils. It so happened that after searching many oils, I came upon a special grade sunflower oil as the best starting material.

 

Up to that time my projects were on large substation type transformers.  I came down from my elevated status to the humble street level transformers that you see as green boxes in your neighborhoods. They all contain petroleum based oil for insulation. They are sealed, so there is hardly any concern over oil spills that may ruin your lawn. But there are somewhat larger transformers near water ways, thousands of them, particularly in coastal areas. Environmental concerns over oil spills have forced the transformer users to look for alternate fluids  which are environmentally friendly. There was no such fluid available when one of the utilities approached our research section in 1995. Well, we took up the challenge, We got some startup funding, and with that began preliminary studies of what became a massive three year project with a million dollar funding. If we researchers do not take up such challenges, we would not have anything to do!

 

Vegetable oil is plenty in nature, and is fully biodegradable. But all vegetable oils are unfit for use in electrical transformers for several reasons. Vegetable oils are of so many compositions, and each oil has multiple components, some of which are unstable when exposed to heat and air for long periods. In a transformer the oil has to last some 30 years, and must remain in good condition. For cooking this is not a problem because the oil is thrown away after cooking, and it will be dark already.

 

We decided to make the impossible, possible.  We  wanted to purify the oil to electrical grade and to stabilize it for long term use. But we soon learned that both are real challenges. First, the oils we use for cooking, the  ‘food grade’ oils are not electrically pure; they contain many conducting materials. These oil shave already gone through rigorous processing and filtering through clay, so how can we improve on that? Secondly, most oils have ‘unsaturated’ components that would gel up on heating or exposure to air. Some oils have more unsaturation than others. Linseed oil used in varnishes have a very high level of unsaturation, and it has the worst kind: tri-unsaturates as opposed to di- and mono-unsaturates. Oils with high percent of fully saturated components freeze fast.

 

Our first task was to choose a base oil. None of the commonly known oils were found suitable. Unsaturation-wise the best oil was olive oil, but even that had 40% unsaturates! We wanted an oil with high mono-unsaturate content, no tri-unsaturate and some di-unsaturates. The oil would not be oil without some unsaturation. It would be a fat.

 

Our search of oils (we had to get help from a University in Texas; my Organic chemistry background also helped) led us to a newly developed variety of sunflower oil. Usually sunflower oil has a high level of unsaturation. But by selective cross-breeding it has been possible to raise the mono-unsaturate level to 80 percent, and remove all tri-unsaturates. This was the best in the market. It was available in limited quantities. The seeds that produce this oil are planted in geographically isolated places in the world. In USA, the Dakotas; in South America, Argentina and so on. I purchased several thousand gallons of this ‘high oleic’ oil (the mono-unsaturate part is the oleic acid ester as in olive oil). We contracted a university which had an oil processing pilot Plant where they did purification experiments with different clays. Finally a  special clay was selected which removed the conducting impurities.

 

The stabilization job was the hardest. We tried all the commonly used stabilizing chemicals; none worked. Then we saw a formula developed by Ciba-Geigy chemical company, and tried it. With some manipulation we found that it worked. The stability test was very severe. We had to flow pure oxygen at water-boiling temperature through the oil for several days, and the oil should not darken or thicken or produce excessive acidic components. We were able to pass the oil with less than one percent of the additive (more would make the oil electrically conductive).

 

This oil was developed for commercial use, so we had to keep secrecy. I had never worked on a project of this nature. First of all, we had to apply for patents. Any prior publication would disqualify the patent application. There was some urgency to apply for patent. We had suspicions some other research labs were also attempting to develop such oils. Even if they did not want to patent, if they had developed an oil similar to ours and published the results, we’ll be finished! And there were some labs which had published papers along this line, but had not developed what we had done. So we filed for patent. We selected a trade name for our product. I coined the name, BIOTEMP for BIOdegradability and high TEMPerature capability. But first I had to have a trademark search to be done to make sure no one had been using it.

 

Once the patent application was submitted we started writing technical papers to announce our new fluid. We showed samples of it in Trade shows. Another advantage of theses activities was our competition would not attempt go develop the same product. We came to know later that a formidable US competition specializing in Insulating fluids had been working parallel to us all those years, but had never hit upon the idea of using a high grade oil;  they used inferior grade oil which they could not stabilize. They also applied for patent but stayed away from stability issues. They just supply the oil in a sealed transformer and seal it. The buyer does not know if the oil is stable or not! Since they use inferior oil, they can sell for half the price.

 

In an article that I wrote for the general reader of Electrical Insulation magazine (Jan/Feb 2002 issue) I showed side by side pictures of our oil and their oil after stability test; ours remained clear; theirs darkened and became a gel. I stopped short of saying their brand name. I had to be careful about exposing our competition.

 

The US Patent Office rejected at first both ours and our  competition’s patent applications. The Patent examiner thought what we had achieved had already been done. It took us one long year of additional experimental evidence and a study of those ‘prior art’ to convince the Patent Office to finally grant us some of the claims of the patent. When a new Examiner came out attorneys resubmitted the rejected claims, and we got all of them granted. So we have now three patents instead of one. Patent-wise we beat our competition in two ways: we got ours first; and they got only one, and it is not even very specific.

 

Our product is now in commercial use, and we have a dozen technical papers on it. The most prestigious of these was at the Paris electrical conference in 1998. Getting accepted was very difficult, yet for the first time I managed to be in it. Bonus: Visit to Paris and its sights.

 

Prestigious R&D Award

 

But that is not all. I get a magazine called ‘Research & Development’. Every year they hold an international competition of inventions and select the top 100. These are announced as ‘R&D 100’ awards and a banquet is held in Chicago each year to honor the winners. The winning inventions are featured in their annual Award issue. It is a coveted Award. Even though I had read these Award issues of prior years, I had not paid much attention to them.  Suddenly it occurred to me that for the first (and perhaps the last) time I should enter the competition. I got the entry forms. I needed a lot of documentation including evidence for commercial use. I used my presentation skills to prepare a colorful, yet not extravagant ‘Presentation Package’ for each of the eight Judges who would not know the submitter’s name. Then I waited.

 

One day in August of 2000 I got in the mail a letter from the magazine editor congratulating me for being one of the Winners. There was going to be a banquet in Chicago at the Museum of Science & Industry in late September of 2000. After getting this letter I postponed my retirement date from September 1 to October 1.

 

Preparations were made for the Chicago trip such as Tuxedo rental, booking hotel and air reservation, and informing the organizers of my attendance for the banquet. Actually my wife also joined me and she went shopping for her black dress to match the black tuxedo. My colleague who had shared the award, and the manager from ABB in charge of the project also came to Chicago. Though there were only 100 awards, the participants for the banquet numbered some 600 people. After the banquet it was time to call the people who had won the award, and the guides took each group of recipients to the podium where the winning entry was shown on the screen, the names announced and the award plaques handed out. There was no cash gift attached; our Company paid for our meals and other expenses. It is was a great evening. I was proud that at least once I had won the R&D 100 Award.

 

Three days after the award, I formally retired from my 24 years of continues job in the Industry. However, I was allowed to do consulting for the Company and to keep my office. So my retirement did not feel like a transition. A month before my retirement I had given a fun seminar to the

Company folks which is the content of the ‘Career Tour’ you may have already watched on this site.

 

Some details of the Award are shown in collages at the end.

 

Going Public!

 

Should a researcher just solve problems and develop products? If that’s all you do, the chances are you will be forgotten as soon as you retire!

 

There are several reasons why you should be your own Publicity Agent: first, your work will be available to the world at large. A lot of research reports do not see the light of the day because they are ‘inside reports’. Many Companies do not want the research reports to be made public.  This is understandable to some extent.  But at the same time, a publication is worth a lot more than a paid advertisement, so Companies often allow publications without giving away key items. In other words, Companies get free publicity through publications. The public gets valuable information on cutting edge research. Future researchers rely on published work to avoid ‘reinventing the wheel’ and to conduct further research. Second, you get publicity of your own. This can boost your own morale, and also benefit you financially through more business, pay raises and promotions.

 

But publicity has to be done thoughtfully. A badly written paper and presentation would leave a poor impression on the readers and listeners. Consider each presentation as a great publicity opportunity provided free of charge to you! Make every effort to write your papers well and make your presentations enjoyable. Use illustrative tools to the best advantage.

 

Certainly I have fared well in the Publicity area because I followed the above concepts. I learned presentation skills, including the preparation of visuals and delivering them (I learned photography during my Graduate years). I consider each Conference a Competition to win! Beyond that, I feel I owe a great presentation because that is what the  people expect.

 

I don’t need to emphasize the need for getting Patents for worthwhile discoveries. Though the patents will be in your name, the beneficiary will be the Company  which files it and meets all the expenses (which can be quite high).

 

The following chart illustrates the Going Public process:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


In addition, it is beneficial to belong to professional societies and technical committees where you can influence many technical decisions on technical Standards and meeting organization.

 

My technical papers have been published in both chemical and electrical journals, and it took a lot of effort to write the papers, revise them and so on. But it was all worth it. A complete list of my publications may be found in the section, ‘Expertise’.

 

I had membership in chemical societies at first, like American Chemical Society (also I was a Fellow of the American Institute of Chemists and Associate of the Royal Institute of Chemistry, England). But later on I switched to IEEE (Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers) due to the change in my career, and I am a Senior Member. If I were to follow the British style, my name would be followed by all these titles: 

 

                        T. V. Oommen B.S., B.Ed., M.S., Ph.D., F.A.I.C etc.

 

But in America we don’t show off our titles.

 

For ego boosting, (or out of weakness?) I have me listed in ‘Who’s Who in Science & Engineering’, ‘American Men & Women of Science’, ‘Outstanding People of the Twentieth Century’(from Cambridge, England), and elected to Sigma Xi (of Scientists & Engineers), National Geographic Society Member, and perhaps some others. Bear in mind most of these are not difficult to get; for a listing fee or annual membership you can join these if you meet the basic qualifications. Many of them try to sell you expensive plaques, certificates and the whole publication! They come back to you with greater honors like .Man of the Year!

 

Concluding Remarks

 

Some of you may want to see what kind of publications I have, and for that you need to go to the ‘Expertise’ section. If you want to hire me as a Consultant, you definitely need to visit there!

 

Hope you have learned something from my Projects. At least you learned how varied my research career was. I had no time to get bored, because the projects kept changing, each with its  own challenge. My success may be attributed to background study, original thinking, proper planning, analyzing data, making quick decisions, trying to find a new plan when the original plan did not work, evaluating results critically, writing reports, making intelligible presentations, and to Providential circumstances. Miracles do happen in research, and one must be prepared for that!  Getting continuous funding for 24 years was itself a miracle that repeated each year. Just when I retired, all the traditional sources of funding ceased! Later on even my lab was dismantled, but I was not affected in the least. I can do my consulting based on my ‘accumulated wisdom’!

 

Did I work too hard? Honestly, not. I never took work home and did not stay overtime.  By taking a good night rest, I found able to function much better than otherwise. Solutions would pop up in my mind, as many other researchers have testified. Another advantage I had was that I could do things fast, and write fast. Does that mean I was impatient? May be!

 

Want to go into Research?

 

Picture Attachments

 

See below two attachments.