Electric.ie Jan/Feb 2021

ELECTRIC.IE • The Magazine & Website for the Irish Electrical Industry • 29 Industry News How to increase uptime and reduce maintenance costs in critical MCC M otor Control Centers (MCC) are a vital part of electrical equipment which control critical motors/pumps operation in virtually every major industry. They are also recognised as a common source of outages, caused by termination failures either on the power IN or Power OUT terminations, where the spring clamp connectors weaken over time, creating a poor connection to the vertical power bus. The outgoing power cable connection is a further common source of connection problems. Finding these problems in advance of failure is both difficult and expensive. The difficulty lies in the location of the power IN/OUT connections being at the rear of the drawer. This makes thermal imaging inspection impossible, as direct line of sight is required, and other components within the drawer obscure the line of sight. An alternative is the de-energise the drawers, ( often this means all the drawers in the entire switchboard), open the drawer door, and either perform a visual inspection, or it the drawer can be removed, take it out and perform a visual inspection – sometimes this may be a thermal image. There are key disadvantages to any of these inspection methods which can be summarised as: • Annual inspections are less than 1% of uptime in a 24x7 production facility. That leaves 99% depending on luck • No viable inspection can be carried on live equipment, and poses a significant safety risk if it is done. • De-energising equipment creates additional downtime cost, and the act of de- energising removes the heat source, making this form of inspection ineffective at detecting a fault. Exertherm, a world leader in thermal monitoring technology has developed a specifically designed solution which enables monitoring of MCC drawers utilising just 3 components which fit inside the drawer, providing thermal alarm notifications, as well as phase imbalance alarm ( this can half the life of a motor ). This simple low cost, easy to fit solution is suitable for both retro-fit to existing MCC’s as well as being included in OEM new build MCC drawers. Exertherm is entirely vendor neutral, and will fit inside virtually every type of drawer. It comes with modbus comms, which mean it can successfully communicate and integrate with any BMS/SCADA front end system. For older MCC which do not have comms, Exertherm MCC monitoring kits include a status LED for the drawer front which uses simple colour change to denote status in the drawer (Green =OK; yellow= warning; Red = Critical). As the world’s leading innovator of thermal monitoring technology, Exertherm now provides another world 1st, with In-Drawer MCC thermal monitoring. To find out how this latest technology can help increase uptime, reduce on- going maintenance opex costs, and increase personnel safety then contact us today!