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Unilin

The international flooring company, UNILIN, utilizes over a dozen production lines currently dependent on traditional motors and drives. With plans to upgrade to a state-of-the-art production facility including VFD and servo drives, this created a situation where the existing automatic capacitor banks for power factor compensation and some harmonic filtering capability were made obsolete. At the same time, the changes in hardware contributed to worsening power quality—plant-wide.

Unilin_flooring_factory_Belgium

Industry: Manufacturing
Customer: UNILIN Flooring (Mohawk Group)
Location: Wielsbeke, Belgium
Timeline: 2008 -
Local partner: Benelux Power Quality Partner

Challenge: Energy Savings and Increased Reliability

After experiencing sudden unplanned production stops, and worried about the risk of increased total voltage harmonic distortion on production, UNILIN explored implementing a power quality solution.

UNILIN faced poor power quality, significant energy losses, and unreliable production capacity.

With a need to keep their production lines continuously up and running, UNILIN sought a matching state-of-the-art active filter solution to ensure better protection without significant capacitive characteristics.

Unilin_manufacturing-Belgium

Solution

To support UNILIN in improving plant-wide power quality and therefore production capacity, Benelux Power Quality Partner facilitated the installation of ADF P300 active filters, including the ADF PPM300 modules.

Products used in this case: 11 ADF P300 filters, mostly in multi-master configuration. Includes a total of 25 ADF PPM300 modules

Thanks to the flexible, modular design of the ADF system, the ADF P300 filters are easily replaced when a filter gets extended, in case of a load increase, for example. And periodic maintenance and servicing is made simple thanks to the straightforward design.

Result

Since installation, UNILIN has experienced a significant energy saving on the overall production line.

The maintenance department has also reported a significant reduction in electronic component failures since the installation of the ADF solution.

With such tangible improvements, UNILIN made the decision to install an ADF filter on each new production line, fed by distribution transformers of typically 1,6 MVA. Experiences with reliability and behavior of different makes of active filters and the local support by a qualified ADF Power Tuning partner, lead to an internal standardization of the ADF P300 type air cooled filters in the whole plant, consisting of 9 substations with 16 transformers in total.