How Power Quality Helps to Prevent Unwanted Shutdowns in the F&B Industry

Related Vendors

Italvacuum, Srl

TRM Filter d.o.o.

ProMinent GmbH

SoftSwitching Technologies

As sag correction requires minimal stored energy, ultra-fast response and battery free sag mitigation equipment is the optimum choice. Such mitigation equipment will provide minimum maintenance and low cost of ownership. Many large manufacturing facilities with mission critical operations have widely accepted the sag mitigation approach, and have implemented successfully sag protection scheme in their plants. Thus, their maintenance cost has drastically reduced, and unscheduled downtime due to voltage sag has been effectively eliminated.

Experience from F&B industries

Following two instances (problem and solution) from the F&B industries, where the plants have adopted the sag mitigation approach, will explain how F&B industries benefit from this initiative.

Problem 1: A major U.S. food manufacturer was having – what was determined to be 15 PLC failures per year. When the failure occurred, the maintenance staff would remove the CPU (over $10K USD each) and replace it with a new one. During this failure, the extruders would stop moving product through the process, and within seconds the product texture would turn into the equivalent of concrete. The machines would have to be taken apart and cleaned resulting in an average of 10 hours of downtime per failure.

This continued for several years with no real understanding of the problem other than blaming the PLC manufacturer. Then a new engineering manager arrived on site, and felt the failure rate was too high – and something else was possibly going on there.

He had the PLC manufacturer perform a failure analysis on several of the PLCs to determine the failure mode – so that the problem could be resolved. The failure mechanism on all of the PLCs that were being removed was ‘NFF’ or ‘No Failure Found’. The manufacturer suspected there was a power issue, so they worked with the end customer to determine that short term power disruptions were the root cause of the downtime.

The end customer rewired all of their motor control centres and installed traditional battery based UPS systems on all of their controls. This solved the PLC failure problem, which was 15 per year to one suspected PLC failure over the next three years. The only issue was that the VFDs for the extruders and the rest of the process were not protected by the UPS systems and still experienced the same 10 hours of downtime each time there was a power event.

It was calculated at this point that these power issues were responsible for approximately 70 per cent of their unplanned downtime within the facility. The end user had plans to install a full plant wide emergency generation system that could be switched on during severe weather to prevent this from happening. The cost of this system was in excess of $6M USD.

Solution 1: While putting through approvals for the generation system, SoftSwitching contacted the manufacturer, as they manufacture a battery free UPS system designed specifically for protecting sensitive automation equipment from short term outages and voltage sags. SoftSwitching's DySC (pronounced Disk) system can be applied for almost any size application, and is designed for harsh industrial environments with virtually no maintenance needed.

One line was retrofitted with the DySC system for approximately $200K and completely solved the problem. With this installation, the major food company eliminated 70 per cent of their downtime on their extrusion lines, and now specifies the DySC technology to their lines as standard equipment.

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