CDG16, David, Zogzog, Tulum, prc, Scotty, BJC,
Please forget about the links to ABB sites, the ABB book 'Testing of Power Transformers' is currently not available and therefore not offered - quite clearly ABB themselves have no idea when the new edition will be issued! And please forget about all the hints to other books possibly replacing this transformer testing handbook - to my knowledge there is no comparable book worldwide! If you are really interested in a comprehensive in-depth book on power transformer laboratory testing you have either to try to get a secondhand copy of the 1st edition of October 2003 or to wait for the 2nd edition, hopefully being issued end of 2007 / beginning of 2008 - and in my opinion it's worthwhile waiting for it.
It sounds ridiculous but I think that the reason for the otherwise inexplicable delay of meanwhile more than a year in issuing the new edition is just money - ABB try to save a few dollars or euros on a project they on the other hand want to use as an international advertising media for their expertise! Both the publisher of the 'old' edition and the publisher of the 'new' edition were or are no professional publishing companies but advertising agencies. The old publisher went bancrupt but perhaps still holds rights on the title of the book and suitably in the course of bancruptcy 'lost' part of the material needed for the new edition so that it had to be drawn up again, and the new publisher told me that information about the issuing date is strictly confidential! It's like on a bazar. The best guess is what one of the authors told me - "probably not before end of 2007". Just to mention it - the publishers were chosen by ABB, not by the authors.
As I can see from the thread there mainly seem to be only a vague idea of the contents of 'Testing of Power Transformers'. Perhaps a rough extract from my German review on the 1st edition of the book might help a bit, hopefully my English is understandable to some extent.
The four authors Åke Carlson, Jitka Fuhr, Gottfried Schemel and Franz Wegscheider are engineers and scientists having worked for ABB (and for BBC before) for a very long time with an accumulated experience of more than one hundred years. Beyond their general knowledge in electrical power engineering they all are specialists in the power transformer field and for this book they worked together with the personnel of several ABB transformer test laboratories. I know two of the authors personally, therefore I may have the one or the other piece of information that will not be found in the official advertisings.
The book is written in English and comprises all the standard and type tests on power transformers performed in transformer test laboratories, also some special tests are considered - unfortunately the items 'd.c. tests' on h.v. d.c. transformers, 'frequency response analysis' (FRA) and 'transfer function' (TF) are missing. The tests are dealt with in separate chapters, arranged in sub-chapters Standards (IEC and IEEE), Purpose of the test, Theoretical and physical basics, Test arrangement, Carrying out of the test, Interpretation of test results. The text is accompanied exhaustively by sketches, diagrams and tables. The transformer test handbook is a 'must have' for engineers in the fields marketing, design, calculation and testing of power transformers, as well as for test inspectors - beyond the direct usability of its contents it makes the communication concerning transformer test items between these different groups of engineers a lot easier. And even teaching and researching personnel e.g. at universities and people generally interested in transformer technology will profit from this wealth of information.
A major disadvantage of the 1st edition of the A4-sized book was the bad binding quality (a problem applying to most of the ABB publications) together with its really terrible highly impractical layout, that blew actual perhaps 200 pages up to 296 pages, making this book of valuable contents an unwieldy tome. This layout far from practical needs in kind of presentation papers was pushed through against the intention of the authors by some higher-ranked PowerPoint-spoiled would-be designers in ABB, who had no idea of the practical use of such a book. Perhaps only a cosmetic snag, but at some places even I as a German got the impression that ABB had saved another few bucks by doing without professional proofreading by native English speakers - a really good publicity for a global player! Though it does diminish the usability of the book in (nearly) no way, the handling of units by four experienced engineers is plainly embarrassing - a problem that unfortunately applies to many engineers.
The 2nd edition of the transformer test book, now probably titled 'Testing of Power Transformers and Shunt Reactors', if it ever should be issued, shall be realized in true book form and will have an improved layout, what consequentially will improve its manageability and clarity tremendously. A new chapter 'Tests on Shunt Reactors' will be added - therefore the extended title. And hopefully at least some of the mistakes concerning the use and writing of units will be corrected - regrettably the authors couldn't be convinced just to apply the rather simple rules and standards for use and writing/printing of quantities and units correctly. Chapters on frequency response analysis, transfer function and h.v. d.c. tests will still be missing.
Peter
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