Driven away

Greater flexibility continues to be demanded from industrial drives within the variety of sectors and applications in which they operate. To meet these demands, drives must usually satisfy one of three requirements — to reduce costs, to increase productivity or to increase functionality. Nowadays it is not always the drives themselves that provide these abilities — often they are delivered through software that is either embedded or supplied as a standalone package.

Cost reduction

A good example of reducing costs comes from the entertainment sector in an upgrade to the heating and ventilation (HVAC) system at the Birmingham Hippodrome theatre, where costs are being cut through the use of variable speed drives. The drives, from ABB, are slashing the energy consumed by motors for HVAC duties by more than a quarter.

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HVAC drives range from 2.2 to 30kW and control motors on the pumps that move hot and chilled water around the building. The motors have been using 25-30 per cent less electricity with the drives, while the cost of running the fans that keep air flowing through the ventilation system has been cut by 28-30 per cent, according to facilities manager Mike Croke.