Author(s)

Dayse Duarte

Departamento de Engenharia de Mecanica, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Recife, Brazil.

For the last 20 years blackouts have been included in the list of major disasters that includes storms, hurricanes, earthquakes and floods. Therefore consumers have become increasingly aware of fires and explosions involving oil-filled transformers located in power plants or substations. Owing to several fires in transformers, the summer of 1997 became known to the people of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as the The Summer of Blackouts. The losses incurred by a blackout are not merely financial. In fact, the loss of operational utility by fire represents only a minor part of the total overall cost in terms of energy availability, human loss and organizational reputation. The costs resulting from the lack of fire risk management in the electrical power industry are no longer acceptable to Brazilian society. The objective of this paper is to address important aspects of transformer fire risk in the context of the Brazil. The aim is to help engineers recognize the implications of decisions concerning the operation of transformers over their life cycles.

Transformer; Fire; Performance; Globalized Economy

D. Duarte, "Aspects of Transformer Fires in Brazil," Open Journal of Safety Science and Technology, Vol. 2 No. 3, 2012, pp. 63-74. doi: 10.4236/ojsst.2012.23009.