Power Quality & Harmonics are the key contributing factors for your utility costs. Our study of Power Quality and Harmonics Study, could help in reducing your utility costs, without incurring large expenditure or undertaking capital intensive projects.
Our study of Power Quality and Harmonics Study, could help in reducing your utility costs, without incurring large expenditure or undertaking capital intensive projects. Let us try and understand what is power quality.
Power quality could be broadly explained as the relative frequency and severity of deviations in the incoming power supplied to electrical equipment from the steady or fundamental 50 Hz, sinusoidal waveform of voltage or current.
spikes, switching transients, voltage swells, electrical line noise, brownouts (TOV & TUV), Blackouts and other power problems before those result in data corruption, equipment damage, or system downtime.
These deviations may affect the safe or reliable operation of electrical equipment’s such as circuit breakers, motors, fans, CNC machines, computers etc.
Power quality is deteriorating rather than improving to the point where damage to hardware and software is sustained from the quality of the power rather than from a power outage. Besides this, most power disturbances within a data centre or telecom room are caused by the equipment itself. New power supplies often used in today’s equipment is based on Switch Mode instead of the traditional linear mode used years ago.
Now that you have understood the concept of Power Quality, you obviously would like to know how poor quality could affect you.
Power quality is affected from both sides of the grid, referring both to the quality and reliability of power as supplied by the utility and to the type and effect of customer loads on the transmission system.
The following are the types of power quality problems:
1. Harmonics: It is a distortion of the utility supplied waveform and are caused by “non-linear” loads, which include motor controls, computers, office equipment, compact fluorescent lamps, light dimmers, televisions and , in general, most electronic loads. High harmonics increase the line losses and decrease the equipment lifetime. Total harmonic distortion (THD) measures the degree to which the input is distorted, and is the relative value of all the harmonics combined, as a percentage of the fundamental current.
2. Transients: Commonly called swells, surges and spikes, transients are the most frequent types of power quality problems and often the easiest to fix. The difficulty with transients is in detection since they manifest only as a short-duration change in voltage.
3. Brownouts: These are hours-long voltage sags caused by system overload. These are tending to damage equipment, but such fluctuations are common in developing countries.
4. Reliability: It refers to the probability of maintaining a continuous supply of electricity without interruption.
So, we understand that power quality could affect your electrical systems adversely and also result in spike in your utility cost. We at A R P A N & Associates LLP could study these impacts of power quality and help you work your way around it and get the best out of your energy cost. Find out how.
From surge suppressors, filters and voltage regulators to isolation transformers, power conditioners and motor generator sets, there is a solution for just about every power quality problem imaginable.
The objective of the power quality audit is to determine the source of power quality problems and to devise a solution to that problem. Prior to conducting a power quality audit, we should look at a facility’s unique power needs and then budget appropriately.
If you are an expert on power quality, we are looking for you. For an exciting career in energy efficiency, do write to us. We would love to work with experts from around the world to deliver solutions across the countries.
If you are an equipment manufacturer or supplier, do drop in the details of your latest products, we work with the best and the latest measuring equipment’s to provide the best to our clients.
