The Ultimate Guide to Power Quality – Solve Problems Before They Happen

Introduction

Electrical power. It’s marvelous, but mysterious. And, because it runs just about everything in your plant, it’s also one of your major costs.

Poor power quality has become a very serious problem in many industrial facilities, and a major underutilized source of cost reduction and economic advantage.

The Electric Power Research Institute estimates that poor power quality costs American industry up to $188 billion per year in direct costs as well as lost productivity. That’s equivalent to the budgets of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana and Wisconsin put together.

In fact, there isn’t another cost reduction potential in industrial plants that comes close to this staggering total. And what’s more alarming is that industry studies have shown about 80% of this number, or $150 billion a year, is caused not by power quality from your electric utility, but by self-induced problems inside your facility, the vast majority of which can be diagnosed and corrected.

Power problems aren’t new, but they’ve almost always been either misunderstood, mismanaged or ignored. For most, unless you’re an electrical engineer, power terms and their associated problems such as harmonics, swells, power factor and more can be a mystery.

Many symptoms and signs of power quality problems occur sporadically, and often when companies least expect it. Major inefficiencies result from unplanned downtime caused by motors that suddenly die, machine controllers that mysteriously lose their programs or values, damaged drives, capacitors that short out and other major issues.

And, with more machinery being run by electrically sensitive equipment such as VFD drives and computerized controls, the problems are accelerating not diminishing. Because production is critical those failed components are often replaced instead of diagnosing and fixing the root cause, which can happen over and over. Part replacement costs soar. And, of course, the lost production time is never recovered.

Until now, diagnosing these costly events required a large group of highly-skilled electrical consultants, expensive specialized instrumentation, and capital appropriation through multiple approval levels.

The MachineSense Power Analyzer is the solution to this problem. This proven technology has been tested for two years with industrial professionals. The result is, the first affordable, easy-to-understand, 24/7 power analyzer for manufacturing professionals that are less skilled in electrical systems.

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Call +1-410-968-6988 to speak with a sales representative with any questions that you may have.

It’s priced thousands less than the typical power instrumentation. Consider it an “industrial MRI” that diagnoses under the cover of your wiring, your electrical distribution grid and your powered machinery, so you can quickly and easily identify the internal power issues and get them repaired immediately.

With Power Analyzer, you’ll know what’s really happening inside your control panels, inside the wires in your walls and inside your drives. But unlike actual MRI reports, you don’t have to be an expert to read and interpret the results.

MachineSense electrical toroids are added directly to incoming power lines or machine power lines to continuously and automatically monitor current conditions. This 24/7 collection of data is sent through an internal datahub directly to your router and is analyzed by advanced cloud-based servers.

Our Crystalball software automatically translates complicated electrical graphs into intuitive, readable dashboards. Armed with this data, you can put together an action plan to tackle the biggest cost reduction opportunity and productivity enhancer in American industry today.

You’ll overcome poor power quality issues and achieve economic gains through reduced utility bills, lowered downtimes and improved productivity.

You’ll also avoid expensive part replacement as well.

You’ll realize a future with significantly reduced motor, drive, controller and capacitor issues.

You’ll be rewarded with dramatically reduced unplanned downtime, lower utility bills, improved productivity and profitability.

Your life just got a whole lot easier.

Let’s take a look at some common power problems and the solution to each.

Why do my electric motors fail?

AC induction motors fail due to following reasons:

1) Thermal stress on stator coil and rotor – thermal stress inside the motors can be caused by several conditions, most common among them:

• Higher harmonics generated by DC drives or nearby Vector drives: Old DC drives for DC Motors and Vector drives for VFD and Servo are a major cause of high harmonic content in factory AC lines. A source closer to DC drives can have as high as 50% harmonics in the distribution unless any harmonic filters are used. Harmonics are unwanted part of the power spectrum and therefore dissipates as heat in the stator coil. 10-20% increase in current harmonics (current THD) can lead to a 30-70C increase of coil temperature and thus can create very high thermal stress which in turn can rapture the coil.
• Unbalanced current phase condition: Unbalanced current condition (different amount of currents in different phases) creates a high amount of heat from an unbalanced amount of currents. Unbalanced currents are caused by uneven tapping of single phase current from different 3 phase current sources.
• High ground noise: If electrical grounding is not proper, signal to noise ratio (SNR) of the current will be low. Due to the presence of high amount of current noise, coils can be heated easily, and thermal stress is generated.
• High ambient temperature: Motor coils do produce resistive heat. This heat is dissipated via convection. If the ambient temperature is high, transport of the heat from Motor coil will be inefficient, and as a result, coil temperature will be higher.

2) Rusting and erosion: If motor is left in an area with high humidity and having gases that can lead to erosion of the coating of the Motor coil (which happens in oil and gas, mining, and many areas where air may get contained.

3) Mechanical stress on rotor from phase imbalance – rotor system can be subjected stress if currents in each phase are not equalized.

4) Surge in voltage: If a nearby transformer is suddenly brought to action, both current and voltage transient may take place which in turn may create additional tearing stress on the motor coil.

The Motor Analytic package from MachineSense can detect almost 80% causes and degradation of Motor rotors and stators.

The following images show common problems:

Voltage spike from inverter

Phase to phase imbalance and insulation breakdown

Turn to turn shorting among the Stator Coils

Defective magnetic wire insulation

Breakdown of ground insulation

 

Overheating damage to the Rotor cage