Merus™ A2-Active Harmonic Filter mobile power quality testing unit delights customers at their installations and fairs in North America
Engineering greetings from the world. Markus Ovaskainen, Sales Manager, Aki Tiira, Service Director and Mika Laakso, Aftersales and Support Engineer from Merus Power team visited to sales partners in North America. During their trip, they worked on an interesting power quality project.
Our sales partner PQ Barcon in Mexico has designed and implemented an interesting mobile power quality testing unit with the help of our Merus Power engineers. The mobile test unit can be transported to a fair or customer’s installations, where Merus™ A2-Active Harmonic Filter operation can be presented and tested with test equipment and even by connecting the mobile power quality test unit to the industrial grid. Of course, connecting the test trolley to the industrial grid requires a proper and secure connection from the installers, but the devices’ operation can easily be demonstrated in a real environment and the benefits seen directly from the active filters’ easy-to-use HMI display before and after the filtration. This way, customers can clearly see the many advantages and benefits that can be acquired with the versatile Merus™ A2 Active Harmonic Filters.
It’s great to see the dedicated customer service that a mobile testing unit can do.
Why do we want to help our customers with power quality issues?
Power quality imposes high costs on businesses. Globally the cost is hundreds of billions a year. The direct and hidden costs of poor power quality are extremely high. The annual cost is estimated to be $119 – $188 billion for U.S. companies and 150€ billion for the European industry. Does your poor power quality cost more than your electricity bill too?
This is a reality in many industries even though it’s not recognized. The cost of power quality problems can be directly related to increased energy consumption but also to hidden costs such as downtime, loss of production, equipment damage, idling personnel, data losses, negative impact on cash flow, customers and marketing value.
Even though we think that the electric network is pretty good in most European countries and the United States, poor power quality is still a significant problem. The use of automation and machining are constantly increasing in industry; however, they are also more and more sensitive to poor power quality issues they often generate themselves.
One example of poor power quality issue is reactive power. Most likely reactive power is causing you to pay remarkable amounts of money every month without you even realizing it.
Wouldn’t you rather use energy to do productive work than to heat the wires and electrical components of your installation? This is exactly the case when it comes to reactive power and power factor. The main cause of reactive power and low power factor is inductive loads. For instance, induction motors, transformers, generators, arc lamps, or electric furnaces. But also, capacitive loads, variations, and underground cables.
Here are a few other examples of power quality problems:
- Outages: The expense of outage is more than the cost of loss kWh during normal operation. One 60min outage during a year is usually much cheaper than 1min outage 60 times a year.
- Dips, sags, swells, surges: If voltage decreases or increases below/above a certain limit for a short time, it will cause, for example, interruptions and damages in control systems causing problems in automation and production.
- Harmonics: “Mysterious problems” are often the result of harmonic distortion. Harmonics have many different impacts such as source voltage waveform distortion, efficiency losses, failures in the compensation system, overheating in motors and transformers, failures in sensitive electronic devices, etc.
- Power imbalance: The current imbalance has two main effects: A higher peak demand in one phase which can lead to heat losses and over dimensioning the feeder. At the same time, a current imbalance creates voltage unbalance when going through the feeder. Voltage imbalance can make e.g. the VSD control system unstable.
Luckily there is a simple solution for all of these issues!
The dependable Merus™ A2-Active Harmonic Filter can solve all main problems in your electrical system. The best part is, it is only one device. One device, but many solutions to help you save energy, achieve higher productivity, decrease downtime and extend the lifetime of devices and components.
- Mitigating harmonic distortions
- Balancing power imbalance
- Increasing power factor
- Controlling voltage variation
- Mitigating flicker
- Load balancing in three-phase systems
Please feel free to contact us to design solutions that fit your purposes. Our products are modular and easy to scale for very different needs.
Merus® A2 – Active Harmonic Filter
Merus® A2 is a scalable, versatile, and durable active harmonic filtering solution designed and manufactured in Finland using innovative Merus® technology.