What is a Current Transformer

We have been working on innovative smart energy saving solutions that can keep a check on those huge electricity bills. One of such innovative instrument is the Current Transformer (CT), also known as instrument transformer which are used to produce an alternating current in the secondary winding which proportional to the AC current in its primary winding. This is widely used for the Non Invasive measurement of AC current.

Working

The widely used practical current transformer is a split core current transformer, in which CT is clamped around the supply line of an electrical load to tell you how much current is passing through it. The split-core design uses M-6 silicon steel formed into a hexagonal or rectangular shape. This allows the core to be opened to the nominal window diameter. CTs may be installed over bushings or over cables and are held in place with cable ties. The supply line act as the primary winding and the secondary will be winded on the core which is clamped over the supply line.

Applications of Current Transformers

Current transformers are winding used in energy monitoring applications and has good scope in IoT. The current electricity consumption of home appliances and other machineries can be monitored without doing any modification whatsoever on the existing system.

It can be used along with the watt hour meter by which we can analyse the power usage of our home or a building. On a similar note current consumption of an entire city can be logged on a cloud server, predictive analysis can be done on the database. Correspondingly we can take precautionary measures to avoid power scarcity. In industrial level it can be used for fault detection in the machinery while it draws over current due to wear and tear.