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UK Water Treatment Plant

Water treatment is one of the largest energy consumers in society. To save energy, there are ongoing upgrade projects. These upgrades involve installing and/or updating to modern, efficient drives to reduce energy consumption of the pumps. Although the drives improve productivity, they also create harmonic disturbances, which then need to be mitigated.

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Challenge

This specific water treatment plant was undergoing upgrades and needed a solution that would keep up with its high energy demands and help the plant meet the G5/4 UK harmonic standard (Planning Levels for Harmonic Voltage Distortion and the Connection of Non-Linear Equipment to Transmission Systems and Distribution Networks in the UK). Additionally, the plant had existing panels (cabinets) with empty space available, but not sufficient space to implement an entirely new solution. What they needed was a solution that could take advantage of the space available and be integrated into the existing infrastructure.

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Solution

Four 80amp PPM power modules at 690V * 

The solution for this plant was coordinated by a system integrator. According to his assessment, alternative harmonic mitigation solutions were too large for the panels. With competing technologies, the power quality solutions are connected to the drives, making them big and bulky. With ADF, the customer can benefit from what is called global compensation. This means that the filter is connected to the bus bar or cable, where the filter can compensate for all the drives on the bus bar. The location doesn’t matter! This ability gives the customer a high level of flexibility. A competing technology would have been unable to meet the challenge in this way.

Due to the limited size and space for installation, the fact that the most compact harmonic mitigation technology available is ADF was a significant advantage, not to mention that this active harmonic filter technology essentially guarantees that the customer will reach the harmonic mitigation target levels – this is not always the case with competing technologies. As a result, the system integrator put together a package with drives and active filters in the existing switch gear panels.

* 690 is a higher voltage and is used for larger equipment, common in water treatment. Very few active filter suppliers can provide 690V.

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Result

Delivery and installation took place in 2014. Since 2014, we have made ongoing deliveries to the plant, which is smoothly up and running without issue.

“A key part of our decision was the superior efficiency of the active harmonic filters compared to the alternative active front end drives.”

Customer reference