Agriculture Supplier

A major agricultural product supplier had issues with it’s process control equipment including computer controlled and monitoring systems locking up and sensitive controls on the main plant air compressor would fault periodically with no actual fault cause reported as well as other intermittent control problems. They reported that the voltages were not within the nominal 277 volts with respect to ground. The costs associated with some of the problems would exceed $15,000 per event. For example every time the main plant air compressor could fault someone would notice that the process would stop, notify maintenance personnel, attempt to diagnose why the compressor was not running, clear the fault and restart the air compressor. When a major fan motor would burn out the associated plant down time, rewind costs, installation time and realignment of the coupling would cause a day’s lost production for the facility. They were seeking a monitoring system to report the health of the power distribution system as well so they could schedule repairs during non-production time.

A power study (Enclosed) revealed the cause of these issues. Voltage spikes and ground faults were causing the process controls to lockup and the arcing ground-faults were causing the drives to lockup. The voltage spikes caused the capacitors to fail plant-wide.

The voltage spikes and imbalances, harmonics at all frequencies (odd and even) and frequency stability were all improved in their entire facility with the addition of one Phaseback VSGR.

The current detectors in each VSGR was connected to the plant monitoring system to detect and alarm any ground-faults within the facility. The VSGR stabilized and balanced the voltages and the entire facility runs reliability without drive faults or capacitor failures.