Maintaining the distribution power substation's health and reliability has been an issue for many years. A typical transformer measurement device detects only one transformer characteristic, such as power, current, voltage, or phase. While some methods can detect several factors, the acquisition time and operation parameters are too long, and the testing speed is insufficient. However, a monitoring system that can check the temperature level of the transformer continuously and predict faults such as overheating, overcurrent, after which the fault diagnosis is relayed to the base station through a GSM modem is developed in this paper. After receiving the message of any abnormality remedial action can be taken immediately to prevent any catastrophic failures of distribution transformers. Key components used in this development are the ATmega328 microcontroller, the GSM modem, the LM35 temperature sensor, ACS712 current sensor, and so on. The GSM-based monitoring of the distribution transformer is preferable to manual monitoring since it is not always possible to monitor the ambient temperature rise, load current manually.

This paper presents results of studies of the impacts of substation monitoring on reliability indices of distribution systems. It was detected that the fault detecting and repair time was the main cause of the prolonged outages experienced in the system which increases the poor reliability indices of the system. The intelligent monitoring device detect open circuit faults and relay to the base station in 30s compared with 3 to 24 hours it was taking to detect fault. The intelligent substation monitoring device reduced the fault detection time and hence improves the reliability of distribution systems. The system was simulated, and result showed that SAIDI was reduced from 244 hours of outage per annum to just 98 hours of outage per annum while CAIDI was improved from 10 hours of interruption per outage to 5 hours of interruption per outage. This paper demonstrated that the fault detection and reporting time can be greatly reduced by the use of intelligent monitoring system and reliability indices.

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Many composite materials are increasingly being used in the technology of many fields of study. They find applications in Aerospace, Civil, Electrical, Marine, Medical fields, etc. In this current study, an overview of all these applications were gathered and then consign the study to an interesting application of composite materials in transportation industries where biocomposites are predominantly used as biomaterials. Biocomposite materials are machinable and require machining procedures in many of their applications, this was extensively highlighted in this study. Also some challenges that stem from their machining were mentioned.