Utility engineers, for good reason, are highly risk-averse. With that in mind, CTC’s R&D engineers met with transmission planners, engineers, asset managers, and installation crew chiefs in the very early days to discuss performance objectives, installation techniques, longevity concerns, and industry-standard test protocols. Working closely with utilities such as Southern California Edison, American Electric Power, Électricité de France, National Grid UK, and many others, CTC not only completed all industry-standard conductor and hardware test protocols in partnerships, it also developed novel test protocols to evaluate the unique attributes of the ACCC® Conductor’s hybrid carbon fiber composite core. These conductor, core, and hardware tests were completed to assess performance and longevity.
Testing of the ACCC® Conductor and hardware has been performed by laboratories in the U.S., Canada, South America, India, Europe, China, Korea, and elsewhere. While trade groups such as EPRI put substantial effort into evaluating the ACCC® Conductor (and other newly introduced HTLS conductors), a number of universities in countries around the world also studied the ACCC® Conductor and its unique composite core and ancillary hardware systems. As a result, dozens of technical papers and dissertations have been published in scientific journals and by global trade associations such as Cigre. The results of this work are available for review by all interested parties.
While CTC Global continues to introduce new ACCC® Conductor sizes and variants, testing continues. Much of this, along with customer factory acceptance testing, is performed at CTC Global’s in-house ISO/IEC 17025 Certified laboratory. For more information about CTC Global’s lab capabilities and quality assurance program, please contact [email protected]
