NIA SSEN 0044 Smart Hammer

Key Activities

The Smart Hammer project has developed a new hammer tool for testing and inspecting the asset health of wooden poles. The project has field trialled the Smart Hammer across the SSEN Operational Regions. Repeatedly striking a pole with the hammer measures the health of the pole and its asset health score is recorded in an accompanying Smart Hammer app.

Expected Benefits

Benefits of this project will be the establishment of a technically and commercially viable Smart Hammer, with accurate and repeatable results to help detect internal rot or damage to wooden poles. The project aims to identify if the Smart Hammer is a consistent and reliable alternative to the traditional method of wood pole inspections, which use a conventional hammer and the operator’s interpretation of the strike. Earlier detection of deteriorating poles will enable proactive replacement, preventing unplanned supply interruptions due to broken poles thus improving system reliability.

Progress

The Smart Hammer has been rolled out to operational staff across SEPD and SHEPD with 50 hammers in circulation. All staff using the Smart Hammer received training in its use and continue to receive ongoing support. This generated over 4,200 Smart Hammer inspections in the Smart Hammer portal. This number of inspections gives the project a statistically significant data set to assess and improve the scoring algorithms. In additional to this, key feedback was captured from the pole inspection staff on the use and reliability of the Smart Hammer.

The results of the project were very positive, the Smart Hammer has been found to outperform the current traditional method of inspecting a wood pole using a lump hammer. After destructive tests of wooden poles, the Smart Hammer was found to have identified rot in poles that had been missed by the traditional testing method. The project was successful in raising the TRL of Smart Hammer from a TRL 5 to TRL 8 ready for Business as Usual (BaU) implementation. It is the intention to implement Smart Hammer into the BaU process for the testing of wooden poles. A funding application has made to the Storm Arwen re-opener to fund the deployment of Smart Hammer. It is the intention to provide a further additional close down report detailing the Smart Hammer development and the validation activities that were carried out during the project.