Water and wastewater treatment involves the use of highly energy intensive processes that must be controlled with precision in order to maintain a safe and sanitary water supply.
VSD compensation and other common issues
One of the biggest challenges for the water and wastewater treatment industry is to save energy. Globally, water management accounts for 4% of all electricity consumption (International Energy Agency, 2014). The use of VSDs (variable speed drives) support water treatment plants in drastically reducing energy consumption, but they come with a cost. Although they help control the plant’s demanding processes, their use on fans, pumps, and other drives contribute to harmonics. When left uncompensated, harmonics have proven to cause problems such as overheating transformers, nuisance tripping, reducing equipment lifetime, etc.
Three advantages for you
1. Save space
Water treatment plants often do not have the luxury of building from scratch. Rather, they must often upgrade with retrofits. When working with an existing physical infrastructure, it’s important to have a solution with a minimal space requirement. ADF products provide powerful compensation in a compact form. In other words, you can do more with less.
2. Achieve redundancy
A chief concern in water treatment is the risk of contamination. These plants provide a critical function for societies around the world. And while this reliance is invisible when processes are working well, society definitely takes notice when something goes wrong. ADF helps prevent drastic problems such as equipment malfunction, unexplained interruptions, and unplanned stops.
3. Enable energy savings
VSDs are crucial for running a water treatment plant, as well as reducing a plant’s energy consumption. ADF enables the plant to run on VSDs without problems by essentially removing the problems that would hinder the VSDs from working their best.
And due to the ability to be installed in-parallel, ADF technology enables lower energy losses than conventional compensation technology.
To learn more about ADF for your water treatment operation, contact us.
