Press Release
INTELLIGENT PUMP CLEANING CUTS MAINTENANCE AT IRISH PUMPING
STATION
The installation of an AC drive with an advanced software tool
has dramatically cut call-outs for blockages at an Irish County
Council pumping station.
Control Techniques’ IPC Lite software has been
fitted to a replacement Commander SK AC drive at a pumping station
at Kelly’s Bay, Skerries in North County Dublin, Ireland and has
cut callouts from ‘ragging’, the fouling of the pump’s impeller,
from a weekly occurrence to just once since it was installed six
months ago.
Ragging is a long-standing nuisance that eats
up thousands of hours of maintenance time in sewage pumping
stations and wastewater treatment plants worldwide. At the
Kelly’s Bay pumping station, two variable speed drives control main
and standby pumps. “The pumping station would run for a
couple of weeks and then we’d get three or four call-outs in a
week,” explains Fingal County Council’s Mechanical Supervisor Jim
McGuiness. “So, when it was time to replace one of the
existing 15kW AC drives, Control Techniques’ Drive Centre in
Newbridge suggested that we had IPC Lite software loaded. It
has worked extremely well, before the software we switched between
the two pumps weekly to spread the load from a maintenance point of
view. However since August we have just run the one pump with
the IPC Lite software and monitored its performance by telemetry,
maintenance costs have dramatically reduced.”
Call-outs for blockages to Kelly’s Bay, a
distance of some 11 miles, took a team of two an average of two
hours each time, a significant maintenance burden and one that has
now been virtually removed. The pump now runs around the
clock, with flow rates varying between 20 and 70 cu.m/hr with IPC
Lite providing early warnings of ragging and initiating cleaning
routines when required.
IPC Lite is an in-drive solution to ragging
that provides very early ‘predictive’ detection of a problem as
well as initiating a client-defined cleansing cycle. It
measures on-board active current unlike other systems that measure
the motor’s nominal current – a measurement that can give an error
of 30-40% on the real torque figure. Control Techniques’
system measures real torque every millisecond. As soon as IPC
Lite sees a change in the active current profile, remedial action
is taken to remove the potential blockage.
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