Page 10 - Fluke News

Legends of Fluke
Epic stories from the field
Fluke recently asked customers to tell us their stories about how Fluke multimeters helped save the day in the workplace. Here is an edited selection of some of the great submissions. Thanks to all who shared.
Ice cream plant
I work for one of the largest producers of ice cream in the world. We had a unit that produces 400 gallons an hour go down. In troubleshooting we found one of the control- ler boards failed. The parts department was out of stock and this board had a long lead-time. The only option was
“We saved approximately $100,000 by repairing the board and in potential lost product.”
to try repair the board. I was one of the only technicians who had experience making bench work repairs on electronics but it was not feasible to get the board to the electronics lab for repair. A fellow technician had
just purchased a Fluke 87 True-rms Multimeter.
I was used to using bench meters but this meter per- formed excellently. We found the bad component on the board and repaired it. Our total lost time was about 2 hours. We saved approximately $100,000 by repairing the board and in potential lost product.
National accelerator laboratory
I work in the high-voltage department. Our incoming line is 345,000 volts. We have two feeders and each is 1,600 amps. They pulse to about 70 MVA every three seconds when they are doing high energy physics. Machine down time costs thousands of dollars. Last fall the power company had a fault and tripped our 2,000 amp 345 KV breaker to load shed. We responded to our substation
not knowing what the problem was. Calling the power company revealed that it was caused by them. When they gave back control to our breaker we tried to close
it. Nothing happened. We soon had a dozen engineers at the station pouring over the drawings. I finally asked to troubleshoot the breaker, it has a very long fault chain and timing relays to allow closure. I got my Fluke 179 out of my truck, isolated the breaker from the 345 KV sys- tems, and asked one of the PE’s to read the breaker print for me. My first point to test with the DC applied–
I had them try to close. I saw the voltage across the chain go from the 130 vdc to about 20 telling us that we had
a high-resistance contact. Within about 10 minutes we found the culprit. It was the 20-cycle timing Agastat relay. I then powered off all the DC to allow the relay to return to the normal state and tried to close. All was fine; the relay was replaced at a later date.
“We had some sensors that were not working correctly. We used the Fluke 289 True-rms Multimeter
to troubleshoot. We finally were able to find some cable that was damaged by rigging continuity with the wire pairs.”
We had some sensors that were not working correctly. We used the Fluke 289 True-rms multimeter to trouble- shoot. We finally were able to find some cable that was damaged by rigging continuity with the wire pairs.
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