Honesty – Best Policy

Dear ample amphibian-

A gentleman from UTILX says that while he worked for Dow Corning Corporation in the early 1990’s he and his colleagues tested the materials that Novinium uses today and that Dow Corning rejected their use because these materials were second-rate, that is they did not work as well as the PMDMS (or phenylmethyldimethoxysilane), the main ingredient of CableCURE^®/XL fluid.

What say you?

California Dreamer

Dear Dreamer-

There are three assertions being made by an Individual From Competition (IFC) who knows better:

Assertion 1: Dow Corning tested the materials that Novinium uses today,

Assertion 2: The performance of those materials was second-rate in comparison to the main component of CableCURE/XL, namely PMDMS, and

Assertion 3: Even with all the other process and catalyst improvements Novinium has made, Novinium’s fluid remains second-rate.

pieces of eight

by t. b. frog

 

you are not the first person, to whom this dream has been spun,

i was not even a glimmer in my father’s eye when this work was done;

somebody is indeed dreaming, but it is easy to set the record straight,

consider these pieces, there are eight.

 

Piece One: Assertion without proof

Let’s say that you had data which demonstrated your competitor’s product was inferior to your own. Wouldn’t you publish it? IFC, come clean … show us the data you purport to possess!

Piece Two: Testimony

To get the straight scoop I went to my colleague, Glen Bertini. Mr. Bertini directed the early work at Dow Corning (circa 1992). He is the guy who conceived of CableCURE/XL fluid, and he is a co-inventor of the materials that Novinium uses today. Mr. Bertini knows that all three of IFC’s assertions are not entirely forthright. The silane materials that Novinium uses today are listed unambiguously on the Ultrinium™ 732 and Ultrinium™ 733 material safety data sheets (MSDS). These materials are …

• tolylethylmethyldimethoxysilane (+ isomer of same & 8-carbon alkoxy analog)

• cyanobutylmethyldimethoxysilane (and 8-carbon alkoxy analog)

Mr. Bertini provides a sworn and notarized declaration (link is nearby) asserting that neither of these materials were tested by Dow Corning or UTILX during the 22-year period from July 1980 to December 2001.

80-20120627_GJB_Declaration.pdf (281.40 kb)

Piece Three: Challenge

Mr. Bertini hereby challenges IFC to a public debate exploring the merits of these assertions. The debate will be recorded in its entirety and provided, unedited on YouTube for the entire world to see and hear. Novinium will bear all of the production costs and will travel to meet IFC at a venue of his choice – any time, anywhere.

Piece Four: Side-by-side taste test – Round I

IFC's employer had an opportunity to demonstrate the superiority of its technology when NEETRAC, NEETRAC’s sponsoring circuit owners, and other NEETRAC-affiliated industry leaders invited UtilX to participate in a side-by-side laboratory experiment together with Novinium. UtilX helped craft an experimental protocol, but withdrew its participation when the experiment was to actually begin. That experiment is complete and included the only rejuvenation firm willing to share their post-injection results in a truly independent experiment – that would be Novinium. UtilX demurred, citing “business and commercial reasons.”

Piece Five: Side-by-side taste test – Round II

If UTILX now regrets that it did not participate in the NEETRAC side-by-side test, Novinium will grant it a Mulligan. Novinium will eagerly participate in a new experiment, which directly compares the post-injection performance of UTILX’s products against Novinium products. It’s not too late to end the debate, but you have to promise not to withdraw at the eleventh hour this time! Novinium will fund the experiment, which will be executed by an independent laboratory with a substantially similar protocol as was previously agreed by UTILX.

Piece Six:  Analogous materials are not second-rate

It should be clear to the critical reader that Novinium’s modern fluids were never tested by Dow Corning or UTILX, but what about the second claim – the claim that the untested materials were second rate? If the materials were never tested, the assertion seems a little silly, but there is another less-than-honest dimension to this second assertion. IFC is suggesting that phenylmethyldimethoxysilane (PMDMS) utilized in CableCURE/XL fluid and Novinium’s own Perficio™ 011 fluid is first-rate or has no peers. Let’s test that assertion against the following statement proffered by UTILX in its paper, “Failures in Silicone-treated German Cables Due to an Unusual Aluminum-Methanol Reaction,” published at the IEEE, PES, ICC in October 2001. To wit …

“In those experiments there was not a statistically significant difference between the performance of methoxy silanes and their ethoxy equivalents. For example, the screening experiments included phenylmethyldimethoxysilane, tolylmethyldimethoxysilane, dimethyldimethoxysilane, and vinylmethyldiethoxysilane, which all had very similar performance profiles. The ultimate choice of the alkoxy group was not driven by performance, but was rather driven by commercial availability.”

PMDMS was chosen because it was cheap and easy to come by! UTILX names several materials for which “there was not a statistically significant difference between the [dielectric] performance” from the PMDMS that IFC now suggest is the one-and-only first-rate performer. The careful reader with some background in chemistry will note a similarity between the named tolylmethyldimethoxysilane and Novinium patented (U.S. 7,658,808 & 8,101,034) tolylethylmethyldimethoxysilane – different only in the two extra methylene units encompassed in the “ethyl.” The two materials are not identical, but they are analogous. The reported data contradict IFC’s second assertion. Novinium has done many experiments with its actual materials and these materials consistently outperform PMDMS. Check out my post of March 15, 2011 to learn how those two methylene units boost post-injection reliability of tolylethylmethyldimethoxysilane using “Chain Entanglement.” But there is more, not only are there unidentified materials in the data published by Dow Corning and reproduced in the illustration nearby, but there are materials which are not disclosed at all. Some unidentified materials performed better than PMDMS. IFC should publish all of the results – even if those results do not support his contentions.

Piece Seven:  Devil in the Details

In the illustration nearby I provide a compilation of data from the two cited sources – both are Dow Corning/UTILX documents. These data are a subset of the data to which IFC is undoubtedly referring when he makes his assertions. As you can see from Mr. Bertini’s Declaration there is even more data, which if it were made public would cast an even darker shadow on the assertions of IFC. It’s interesting data for sure, but it does not support the notion that PMDMS is particularly special. There are a variety of other materials, which show statistically similar performance. But what is the ACBD of the y-axis? It’s the AC breakdown strength (50% probability) after 6 months of immersion in ambient temperature water and 2.5X rated voltage (20 kV). Is that test protocol a good predictor of performance after 20 years? After 40? Of course, not. To suggest so would be like declaring that the horse in first place at the first turn will win the derby. The testing to which IFC refers is a short-term screening experiment and cannot discriminate long-term performance.

Piece Eight:  Overlooking the catalyst

Not only was the experiment woefully short and not thermally accelerated, all of the silanes tested were catalyzed with 0.2%_w titanium(IV) isopropoxide (TIP). Novinium does not use TIP because it suffers from an unacceptably low catalytic efficiency. It’s about 39% inefficient. Novinium’s patented catalyst technology is 98% efficient. See my previous posts on the subject of catalytic efficiency at …

Catalytic Considerations – Component I (January 3, 2011)

Catalytic Considerations – Component II (January 5, 2011)

Novinium’s master scientists have not tested every water reactive material shown in the illustration with our patented catalyst technology, but we have tested all the commercially important ones. Without exception, long-term performance, what I like to call persistence, is substantially improved by the application of Novinium’s U.S. Patent 7,700,871.

There is an old Madison Avenue adage, “If you don’t have anything to say – sing it!” Which of the following do you like the best for the IFC Corollary? (check all that apply)

ü  If you don’t have any facts – wing it!

ü  If the facts don’t support your position – obfuscate!

ü  If you won’t spend money on R&D, cite 20-year-old data out of context!

Finally, I have a selfish appeal directly to IFC, who is one of my most loyal readers. Don’t change your story one iota! The reason that so many circuit owners tell us of your tale, is that it isn’t credible. Send me your comments and I will publish them here unedited.

Credibility is transparency,

T. B. Frog

80-20120627_GJB_Declaration.pdf (281.40 kb)

Real World II – Duke Deception

In my last post of 2011 one of my local fans, Wondering in Western Washington, questioned the veracity of the claims made by UTILX^® in a document titled, “Life Extension Estimate for UtilX^® CableCURE^® Rejuvenation Fluid.”  That document includes 17 pages and a bunch of interesting claims. In this second of a series of posts, I consider two claims proffered on the bottom of page 3.  To wit …

“[Micro Infrared spectroscopy is] performed routinely on post injected cables. An example is provided by the published paper [3]; ''Case Study: Rejuvenation Fluid Injection Results from Duke Power's Little Rock Retail Tap Line, a 115kV XLPE, Buried Transmission Circuit."  Figure One shows a chart from that paper demonstrating that the quantity of fluid, even after 10 years, exceeds the target concentration for a six to nine month old injected cable. Two points are established by Figure One. The first is that fluid in optimum injection quantities still exists in the cable's insulation. The second is that the rate of fluid decay is too small to measure after 10 years.”

Notes: Reference 3 above is to a non-peer-reviewed paper provided Stagi & Kimsey at the IEEE T&D Conference (Dallas, TX), May, 2006. An augmented facsimile of "Figure One" referenced above is shown in the graph below in the third illustration. All punctuation and grammatical errors were left as they were found by this frog.

Fallacy of the Anecdote

The author is attempting to make a case for the efficacy of his product.  This Duke cable, and as we shall see in future posts, all of his examples except for the example of Northeast Utilities, is not representative of the population of “real world” cables. Let’s enumerate the problems with this single anecdote.  Of the population of treated cables, the vast majority is single-phase URD cables with 7- or 19-strand conductors. The vast majority has insulation thickness of less than 260 mils and is unjacketed with bare concentric neutrals. The Duke cable has a 61-strand conductor, holding much more fluid and the insulation thickness is three to four times thicker than the population norm.  The Duke cable has a copper taped shield, semi-impervious to permeation, and a 170 mil thick PVC jacket. In the table nearby I tally up the estimated impact of some differences.

All of these differences place the Duke cable among the least representative samples one might choose to make a population extrapolation. On top of the unrepresentative nature of the Duke cable design, the author makes an egregious omission.  The Duke cable was not only treated from the conductor outward, as is the norm within the population of treated cables; the annular space under the cable’s jacket was also treated. The cable was treated from the inside-out and from the outside-in. This highly salient fact is not to be found in the author’s papers or accompanying slides.  Taken together the differences put the Duke cable outside of the norm by about a factor of 240!  That's not 240%; that's 24,000%!

First Assertion:  Fluid remains in optimum injection quantities

In this season of presidential debates, I am reminded of the single Reagan-Carter debate of 1980, which I recently watched on YouTube.  Over and over again, when Jimmy Carter made some bizarre claim, Ronald Reagan would chuckle and say, “There you go again.”  Frog to author:  There you go again – assertion without proof. What precisely are the “optimum injection quantities?”  Are you suggesting that if the concentration profile were say, 20% higher, that the reliability of the cable would be poorer? That notion is silly and directly contradicted by earlier peer reviewed work done on the same cable. I will reference that work in the next paragraph. In the graph that I reproduce nearby, the author presented a green dotted line labeled “Target Concentration,” just below 1.5%_w. If I were a betting frog, I would bet that the Target Concentration was chosen after the micro-infrared data was compiled. How else to explain an utter lack of justification for the figure? There you go again – assertion without proof.

Second Assertion:  Fluid decay is too small to measure after 10 years

There you go again – assertion without proof.  Where is the measurement from 10 years earlier to make the claim?  The author doesn’t provide the data. Fortunately, Novinium houses the world’s largest library on rejuvenation science and a decent comparison can be found there. In the figure nearby I have inset micro-infrared data from the same cable. The data was published in “Cable fault prevention using dielectric enhancement technology” presented in June, 1995, by Novinium’s own Glen Bertini at the peer-reviewed Jicable conference in Versailles, France. The assertion is false.  The average concentration in 1995 was about 3.5%_w, the average concentration a decade later was about 1.7%_w – a factor of two is not too small to measure.

Executive Summary

There is undoutedely a good reason that the author of “Life Extension Estimate for UtilX^® CableCURE^® Rejuvenation Fluid” tried to keep this paper away from reasonable scrutiny. A cynical reader might even think that the author is trying to mislead his audience.  Rejuvenation fluids do in fact improve the performance of transmission cables, but the author would have you believe that treating such cables is a greater technical challenge than treating a 15kV URD cable.  In fact the opposite is true. Cables like the Duke cable should experience extremely long post-injection life, but that success is not easily extrapolated to 7- and 19-strand cables. The old technology used at Duke was conceived and deployed by a Novinium founder.  That technology works well in non-demanding applications like cables with really thick insulation or low loads. In the decades that have transpired since the introduction of that old approach, those who are masters of rejuvenation technology came to recognize that one should not treat transmission cables the same as one would treat a URD cable. Only at Novinium is patented technology (U.S. Patent 7,611,748) available to address the full spectrum of cable types, sizes and flavors. This frog will not employ deception to convince anyone.

Novinium’s Integrity Value: Truth and knowledge are the foundation of the Novinium character. Each will be advanced at every opportunity and neither will be compromised.

Truly yours,

T. B. Frog

Real World I – High K

In my last post of 2011 one of my local fans, Wondering in Western Washington, questioned the veracity of the claims made by UTILX^® in a document titled, “Life Extension Estimate for UtilX^® CableCURE^® Rejuvenation Fluid.”  That document includes 17 pages and many, many claims. In this first of a series of posts, I examine the following set of claims from page 3:

Once the CableCURE^® molecule reaches those sites it performs two important functions. First, it chemically combines with the water, desiccating the water tree site. Second, it polymerizes; the polymeric chain that forms continues to grow until its chain length traps it inside of the water tree structure. Once trapped inside of the cables insulation, it serves as a “high K" style stress gradient reducing the electrical stress amplification that occurs at the tips of the water tree “branches". This two part functionality arrests the growth of water trees in aging cable.

I added highlighting to focus on the words and phrases of the claims that could create confusion; I left all puctuation and grammer errors untouched.  The first two words I highlighted could be characterized as quibbles, but I endeavor to be precise in my language. I am sure the author will appreciate my clarifications, since these claims taken together with others are held out as “irrefutable proof” of CableCURE efficacy. The third highlighted “high K” claim will receive the majority of my attention today.

Desiccating

The CableCURE molecule to which the author refers is phenylmethyldimethoxysilane or PMDMS for short. The chemical reaction of PMDMS with water is well understood. On average each PDDMS molecule consumes about one water molecule.  The effect is real, but the implication of the claim is that this desiccation-by-reaction is one of PMDMS’s two important functions.  It is not. The reaction with water is a necessary precursor to a subsequent condensation reaction. In the next sentence the author refers to this second reaction as polymerization.* Chemical desiccation is not important because the phenomenon is fleeting.  Consider the data reported by another UTILX employee in “The Importance of Diffusion and Water Scavenging in Dielectric Enhancement of Aged Medium Voltage Underground Cables” at the IEEE PES T&D meeting in Chicago, 1994.  Figure 4 and the accompanying text indicate that the water reactive capacity of PMDMS is exhausted at between 54 and 67 days for a 1/0 conductor at 60°C.  At lower temperatures the time to exhaustion might be longer, even on the order of a year or even two. When one is talking about decade-long life extension, a couple of months or a couple of years is not of critical importance. None-the-less, PMDMS does help keep the insulation dry for many, many years, but not by the mechanism suggested by the author. Instead, the mechanism is preferential wetting, which is well described in U.S. Patent 7,976,747 held by Novinium and in the paper “Advances in Chemical Rejuvenation of Submarine Cables” available here. The reason the distinction is important is that only Novinium^® brand Ultrinium™ 73X fluids include components with preferential wetting properties superior to PMDMS. Reducing the amount of water present in the insulation is indeed important, but not all rejuvenation fluids perform the same in water reduction efficacy.

Trap

The word “trap” is too absolute for this frog. Trap implies eternity and it just isn’t so.  In a December 29, 2010 post, “Chain Entanglement,” I explain how the larger oligomers substantially retard the exudation of the rejuvenation fluid, but it is not trapped. As shown in the figure nearby, improvements in rejuvenation molecules patented by Novinium (U.S. patent 7,658,808 and others pending) are designed to stick around in the insulation longer than PMDMS.

High K

There is no agreed-upon definition for High K, when applied to stress grading in power applications.  At 20°C and 60Hz, the dielectric constant or “K” of unfilled polyethylene is about 2.3 and EPR insulation varies from about 2.7 to 2.8 depending upon the specific compound. (See Bartnikas & Srivastava, Power and Communication Cables, IEEE 2000.)  The dielectric constant for PMDMS is 3.2. The dielectric constant of PMDMS is indeed higher than PE and EPR insulation, but using the word “high” is a bit of a stretch.  High K materials are quite often used in shrink-to-fit splices and terminations.  For example, 3M’s data sheet for its Quick Term II Silicone Rubber Termination Kit states:  “The High-K material has a dielectric constant of about 25.”  Pure water has a K of 78. Cyanobutylmethyldialkoxysilane or CBMDAS for short, a patented component of Novinium^® brand Ultrinium™ 73X fluids, has a K much greater than that of water.  3M’s stress control material, water, and CBMDAS are “real life” High-K materials.  I have arranged these six materials in a table nearby for easy reference.

I object to the statement proffered by the author for two reasons …

     1. It is an assertion without proof.  If the author believes that the mechanism he claims is significant with a K of just 3.3, he should provide a calculation or measurement as substantiation.

     2. The PMDMS is replacing water, which has a much higher dielectric constant.  How could that conceivably provide stress grading?  CBMDAS on the other hand, enjoys a K greater than the water it replaces.

Executive Summary

The author of “Life Extension Estimate for UtilX^® CableCURE^® Rejuvenation Fluid” is not a master of the facts. While CableCURE fluid does dry the cable and extend its life, the explanation of why this is so lacks foundation. Stress grading at the microscopic scale is possible with materials that have dielectric constants greater than the water that they replace.  One example of such a material is available only from Novinium and is protected by a U.S. Patent, other pending patents, and their foreign equivalents. While this frog cannot be sure what the author was thinking when he made his claim, I can provide a common-sense recommendation: Do not rely on secret documents that have not been peer reviewed … especially if they include assertions without proof.

Always basking in transparency,

Thermonuclear Bull Frog

*The correct terminology is oligomerization, but I will let that slide.

Middle East Query – Rejuvenation Impact on Conductor Shield

 

Dweller of the Desert asked 22 questions in his post …

 

Middle East Query – 22 Questions.

 

In this installment I address question 9.

 

9.   Will the injection affect the semicon around the conductor, since the fluid will penetrate through it?

 

Semi-conductive shields are carbon-black-filled polymers. Typically the carbon-black loading is about 50%.  Electrons flow through the carbon black, because the conductive carbon black agglomerates are physically touching each other.  The polymer in between the agglomerates is a dielectric. All rejuvenation fluids are quite soluble in the strand-shield. Of course, part of that solubility is because the fluids diffuse into and through the amorphous portions of the polymer. To learn how that happens, check out my 15-March, 2011 post Chain Entanglement. Even more significant than diffusion through the polymer portion is transport though the carbon black agglomerates. In the diagram nearby nano-me (my nano-sized alter ego) demonstrates the morphology of the carbon black at greater and greater magnification. Carbon black has a great deal of volume in micro-sized and nano-sized holes and pores that provide flow paths for fluid transport. Novinium fluids are selected and tested to verify that they have no detrimental effect on cable materials. Upon exposure to Novinium dielectric fluids there is a slight increase in the resistivity of the conductor shield, but well within the IEC and ICEA conductivity specifications. The typical increase is on the order of 1% of the ICEA S-94-649 2000 specification.  The agglomerate-to-agglomerate electrical connections are not perturbed in a substantive way. Novinium^® Ultrinium™ fluids include high dielectric constant stress grading components. High dielectric constant conductor shields are used by at least one EPR cable manufacturer. Ultrinium fluids improve the dielectric performance of the cable system including the conductor shield.

T. B. Frog