The Brazina Group can help solve your power quality problems
Today’s businesses are challenged to do more with less, increase yields or equipment up time and improve worker productivity. As facilities and machines are more automated they are becoming more sensitive to disturbances on the electric lines that power them.
While power quality may mean different things to different people it’s simply “any occurrence manifested in voltage, current, or frequency deviations which results in failure or misoperation of customer end-use equipment.” That is, it should be defined by its impact on the user.
You may have heard generic and erroneous expressions like brownout, dirty power, spike and many more. These don’t get into the technical characteristics of the disturbances. Here are a few useful terms to get to the heart of the issue:
Transient
- Transients can be caused by lightning, load and capacitor switching, faults.
Swell or Overvoltage
- May be caused by rapid load reduction, faults, poor wiring (loose neutrals), and voltage regulation problems.
Electrical Noise
- Any unwanted signal appearing on the power and/or data lines often caused by transmitters, arc welders, electronic devices.
Harmonic Distortion
- Frequencies other than the fundamental 60 hertz power.
- Typically caused by the current required by non-linear loads such as rectifiers, power supplies, and electronic loads.
Interruption
- Total loss of voltage lasting from less than 1 second to hours or longer.
- Often caused by transfer switching, faults, and equipment failure.
Sags or Undervoltage
- Most common electrical disturbance and can greatly vary in magnitude.
- Can occur due to lightning, equipment failures, rapid load addition, and faults.
- Can result in extensive cost impacts but solutions may be inexpensive
How can The Brazina Group help?
Because we aren’t tied to a specific product or solution we can look at your problem holistically. A typical investigation would include:
- Review plant one line & distribution diagrams,
- Electrical data collection to determine types, magnitude and timing of disturbances
- Evaluation of end use equipment needs
- Determination of causes and sources of disturbances
- Recommended solutions
