Recovers 90% of energy consumed by centrifugals
July 1st 2010 Thomas Broadbent & Sons, a
developer of solid-liquid
separation equipment, is
using Vacon AC VSDs with Active
Front End (AFE) technology to
recover up to 90% of the energy
consumed by the batch centrifugals
it supplies to the sugar processing
industry.
Centrifugals work with loads of
between 1.5 and 2t, and can process
up to 25 loads/hour. They are driven
by AC motors rated between 160 and
400kW. Operating duty is onerous,
so Broadbent produces special
motors of its own design.
The company adopted regenerative
drives for its machines. These allow
energy produced during braking to
be fed back into the supply system.
This means net energy consumption
of the centrifugals is reduced by 80%
or more and problems of heat
dissipation are eliminated.
The regenerative AFE drives have
controllable solid-state switches in
their input section.
Graham Hindle, chief electrical
engineer at Broadbent, says "AFE
drives provide high efficiency when
operating in both motoring and
regenerative modes.
"Tests showed the Vacon drive
could be readily tuned to meet our
needs and that it offered better
performance than
other drives we
had tested." More articles from Vacon Plc: | 
