Installed Reliability

Electric Utility Company

We were at a site visit with a customer and our sales representative mentioned that he was working with another customer nearby that was having trouble with their prototype transformer. So we decided to pay a quick visit to this customer. The customer in question, a supplier to an electric utility company, had auto transformers that were underperforming. We obtained their spec sheet and viewed product from a competitor that was bad. The competitor’s product had 30 failures out of every 100, transformers that were not even close to the required +/- 0 tolerance, and epoxy that did not cure.

We built some transformers for the company, but the middle transformer failed by one turn. Testing the product was more difficult than we expected because we kept getting conflicting readings from the tester. Our engineer developed a better way to test and from that time on we were +/- 0.

The owner of the company was impressed with our engineer and our ability to build a reliable product. The parts we make are mission critical; if they malfunction, they can explode like a grenade. To date, we have an install base of well over 85,000 and we have only had 1 failure.

Medical

Since 2001, we have been shipping a 2kVa ISO medical transformer for a power supply unit to a domestic customer. In 2007, our customer was acquired by another company and, subsequently, their assembly went overseas. Cortec was prepared to serve as a backup from our current US location when the company moved. However, the offshore companies that tried to make the transformers failed because the winding had to be +/- 0. So we continued to ship transformers to them and now we currently supply them worldwide. We were able to provide them with reliability and optimal performance, where others could not. We have an install base of over 15,000 and have not had a single failure.

Department of Defense

We were recommended as a preferred supplier for a new project involving upgrades for a ground fighting vehicle. We designed a toroidal transformer and 2 toroidal inductors. Laminates would have been the choice for this system, but they required 30% more power, and the transformer was already pushed to the limit. For this application, there cannot be failures as lives would be at stake. The matched set we developed was pushed to the limits, but we were able to do so while maintaining the required reliability. We have 7,636 transformers and inductors installed worldwide and have only had 2 failures.

Avionics

We were approached by a Fortune 500 company to wind toroids for an existing board according to their specifications. However, it was virtually impossible to mount the transformers and inductors to meet the specifications. We had our engineer, along with two of their engineers, working on the project and everyone concluded the board would have to be re-designed. We returned the board and the wound toroids to them so they could be assured that the new layout would work in their environment. Upon receiving the new board from them, we built the first prototype and it worked perfectly. We then built 10 sample boards. Our production is now at full capacity for this circuit board.

Total Uptime for Mission Critical Parts

                                                                        Uptime             Installations
Utility:    85,000 installed, 1 failure        99.9971%         US & Canada
Medical: 15,000 installed, 0 failures      100.0000%      Worldwide
DoD:          7,636 installed, 2 failures      99.9710%          Worldwide