When it all runs round
New regulations spur innovation

Hardly anything runs in this world, and that includes the chemical industry, without drive technology. Drive components are to be found everywhere where forces and moments of rotation are to be transmitted, or where there is movement. This branch of industry has to thank the increasing digitization, but also new EC requirements, for new technical products.
Whether in ventilators or stirrers, in dosing balances or in coating installations - electrical drives are to be found everywhere in the chemical industry. And further, they certainly belong to the most frequently used actors in process control engineering. Even so, they are comparatively modest, many of these powerhouses have done their job in the chemical industry for more than 20 years without any great breakdown. How many of them there are is difficult to determine. There are around 120,000 electric motors in the BASF factory in Luwigshafen, for example. Their performances range from 0.5 kW up to 21,000 kW. The greater part of them are low voltage motors with a performance below 250 kW. These figures agree with the experience of the Namur working group "Drives"; in an investigation three years ago a range of drives from 0.1 to more than 10 MW was found in the chemical industry. Controlled speed drives are gaining ground. They make up about 5% of the drives in chemical process engineering, in the Ludwigshafen factory there are also about 7000 variable speed drives in use (5.6%). Three years ago, the total replacement value of this equipment in representative factories of BASF, Bayer, Hüls and Hoechst was of the order of 100 million Euro.