Red Hen Camera Equipment and Technolo...

Red Hen Camera Equipment and Technology Vital for Aerial Surveys of Transmission Lines in Canada RotorNews October 1, 2010 Hydro One is the largest electric utility serving customers within the province of Ontario, Canada. The company manages 30,000 km of transmission lines. Essential to aerial data collation efforts is the sophisticated camera equipment and Red Hen technology mounted on helicopters, as well as the software applications for processing the data and creating work products. At the front of the data collection platform, mounted to the belly of the helicopter is a custom built PolyTech Kelvin 350 gyro-stabilized Gimbal which includes: a FLIR 570 IR, Sony Video camera and Canon PowerShot G5 still frame camera. The cameras can all be operated at the same time. A Red Hen sDVR records video from the FLIR and Sony camera while "indexing" the video with GPS metadata. As a proactive organization, Hydro One strives to detect anomalies in the system before they fail. Leading this effort is Mr. Derrick Brydges, a certified H&S (Health & Safety) rep and Certified Level 2 Thermographer. Derrick is Hydro One's specialist responsible for aerial surveys of the company's transmission lines. Hydro One also employs a Thermographer whose primary role is to patrol the Distribution system from the ground, while Derrick uses a helicopter and ground vehicle depending on the distance and terrain. The 30,000 kilometers patrolled by Derrick, is strictly transmission lines of 115, 230 and 500KV. The goal is to ensure that the data collected can be used to pin-point areas of interest, any detected anomalies are reported and addressed on a priority basis. Keeping information current is one of the best ways to be proactive in maintenance. By doing so, Hydro One ultimately saves their customers and stakeholders' time and money by enabling crews to schedule the maintenance instead of waiting for an outage to occur. According to Brydges, "A planned repair helps reduce the costs of locating the fault on say a 100 kilometer Transmission line. This would require requesting a helicopter patrol, assembling the personnel and material. An unplanned outage can also affect the generation plants which may have to bottleneck electricity. With a planned outage everything is planned and prepared which drastically reduces the outage times and costs." Images from the Canon are geo-tagged after the mission using Red Hen's FieldTools software to match the sDVR GPS track logs to the images. When patrolling from a ground vehicle, Derrick uses a Nikon DSLR camera with a Red Hen Blue2CAN for instantaneous geo-tagging of the image. All the geo-tagged data is imported into one of Red Hen's software solutions: isWhere for Google Earth and GeoVideo for ERSI ArcGIS so Hydro One can leverage Red Hen media with their own TLGIS (Transmission Lines Geographic Information System) data in ArcMap. Recently Derrick with team members, Len Gunson and Bradley Smith, used the cameras and the Red Hen systems to upgrade Hydro One's TLGIS. The team is regularly capturing many kilometers of transmission line video and digital images of structures. In one project, the team captured over 1,100 structures which had to be processed and Geo-referenced in the TLGIS application. Accuracy of data and efficient usage are what make Red Hen products so valuable to Derrick and the Hydro One team. To ensure success and reduce downtime, the Hydro One team invested in the customized Red Hen training offered. Like many of Red Hen's customers, Derrick heard about our products from talking to contacts within his industry. "Red Hen products have made my job much easier, enabling me to promote other programs that would not have been possible otherwise," comments Brydges.

Posted on Friday, October 01, 2010 (Archive on Monday, January 01, 0001) Posted by NStaff  Contributed by