Applications
Power quality disturbances often occur without warning and are inevitable part oftoday’scomplex power distribution network. Demand on power generation is ever growing and power distribution systems are often stressed to their capacities.
Power quality, or rather the lack of it, has definite impact on all equipment & system; resulting in damage to expensive equipment and loss of production.
An equipment may suffer unexplained malfunction or inadvertent failure and power quality could very well be at the root of it.
OEMs may not support free replacements if power quality has been identified as the root cause.
However, power quality studies are often undertaken after an event has occurred; damage done.
Portable equipments are the best support to analyze power quality in a comprehensive manner. However, portable instrumentation may not be suitable in terms of its memory capacity and requirement of connectivity for long duration if the monitoring extends for weeks. Moreover, monitoring multiple locations is close to impossible with portable instrumentation.
Where we help
Energy Integra offers services in situations which demand a long term power quality monitoring.
It will also support multi-location simultaneous & real time monitoring.
Poor power quality received by an equipment may havethe cause of a disturbance within the distribution network or received from the supply system. For example, a large VFD installed in a rolling mill in a steel plant trips inadvertently. The event log in the VFD simply indicates a voltage dip; whereas other equipments connected to same bus are not affected. The voltage dip could be due to large load switching or capacitorbank switching within the plant or it could have occurred on grid to which steel plants are often connected due to their large demand of power.
Such events call for diagnostics that require long term power quality studies. Moreover, it may require simultaneous monitoring of locations upstream of VFD. The power quality events captured by multi-location instrumentation can help in identifying where the trouble started and how the equipments on the different voltage bus responded.
Solutions
Energy Integra could offer solutions in long term power quality monitoring with following options
Option-1 : Long term PQ Monitoring with a rental set up.
Option-2 : Sale of long term PQ monitoring set up.
The options include support in terms of configuration of set up, training on usage, trouble-shooting, data management and diagnostic support as desired by customer.
Power quality standards
The principal standards in power quality areIEC 61000, EN 50160, IEEE 100, IEEE 1159, IEEE 1453, etc.
These standards define the type & severity of power quality disturbances and shall be referred to while mapping tolerance of different type of equipment exposed to these disturbances.
Power quality disturbanceclassification
• Voltage : dip, swell, interruption
• Voltage flicker
• Sustained under and overvoltage
• Voltage spike
• Rapid voltage changes
• Voltage distortion : harmonics and inter harmonics
• Voltage asymmetry
• Voltage unbalance
• Voltage transient – power frequency or high frequency impulse
• Power frequency variation
