Electricution

The bright beams in the engine room changed to the muffled light of the explosion-proof lamps. A siren blared from the loudspeakers. 

 - Generator at the proper speed. 

 - Start! 

 - Frequency? 

 - One thousand... three... five thousand! 

 The hall was filled with the steady hum of a spinning shaft. 

 - It's stable. Close the circuit! 

 The hum was drowned out by the whirring of hundreds of kilovolts. 

 - Second, two seconds, circuit break! 

 - Shut it down. The fire extinguishing system went on in the test chamber. Everything worked properly, the subject passed the test.

 

You might think there was an accident. But not here: fires in these test chambers are common because industrial electrical equipment is tested here at extreme loads. Employees of this institute have become accustomed to the fireworks of exploding oil-cooled transformers, drops of liquid metal on the floor, and burnt walls of the test chambers.

The stress resistance of tested products is determined by the operating time during a short circuit and the amount of current they can withstand.

The short-circuit mode is created by a special kind of generators. There are three of them in the hall.

These generators differ from the usual generators used in power plants in their mode of operation. They are not designed for continuous operation, but in a matter of seconds, they can generate the extreme power needed for testing.

Another difference between these and conventional generators is that they are not powered by steam, but by electric motors.

The test process looks like that: the generator is accelerated, the circuit is shorted to the test item, it burns or passes the test, and then the generator is turned off and cooled.

Behind the generators, there are synchronization reactors, which are responsible for adding up the power of the generators, if necessary.

Such a cool test facility must have a cool control room. Here it is.

It's nice to see that the equipment and automatics here are still. And everything still works!

Nostalgia keeps the employees from removing the map.

  We go on the bridge to look at the engine room.

One control room? Not at this place! The best control room!

That's all.

Until we meet again!