DART Water Industry Case Study

No one wants breakdowns - your DART partners included.The impact on production can be huge, as well as being stressful for your engineering team and costly when external experts have to be brought in.

So, when a critical water site application began to suffer failures when drives were installed in 2009, it was cause for concern. There was a risk to the water supply and call-out charges were mounting.

No obvious reason could be found, despite lengthy post-failure investigations. DART (still in its BETA version) was introduced to monitor the 3 x ABB 560kW low harmonic inverters. And it quickly discovered what the problem was.

During duty standby changeover (as the inverter cooled down) the humidity started to rise inside the panel section until condensation formed on key electronic components. When the inverter was restarted during the next duty standby rotation, the condensation was causing a catastrophic failure. A point worth noting is that 74% of ALL inverter breakdowns are caused by dust, temperature, H2S, humidity or external abuse.

The solution was simple: the addition of anti-condensation heaters to each inverter module. This solved the issue instantly.

Below you can see DART's monitoring of the environmental conditions. The red line is the internal cabinet temperature. At point 1 the inverter is stopped for duty rotation. The humidity (blue line) can be seen rising rapidly until condensation is formed on internal components.

See another DART remote monitoring case study.