Smart Devices Applicable in Transformer Core Manufacturing

A number of factories are carrying out the ongoing process of digitalization and automatization of their numerous processes in the interest of speeding up the overall process, reducing the error rate or increasing productivity and/or quality. One of the main components of a power transformer is its core, which is made of thin stacked sheets of steel. Due to the complexity of the manufacturing process and the dimensions of sheets and the overall core, the whole stacking process needs to be precise and have relatively low tolerances. All of this dictates a relatively big number of control parameters and measurements during the core manufacturing. Therefore, it is of importance to devise the methodology and smart devices that can speed up the measurements and help in increasing the measurement quality and worker safety. This paper presents such an approach, by showing custom-built devices for that purpose, together with the accompanying software.