50 ELECTRIC.IE • The Magazine & Website for the Irish Electrical Industry • POWER DISTRIBUTION ENCLOSURES CLIMATE CONTROL Enclosure Climate Control Whatever the scale...... ......we have the solution Rittal Everyone prepared for the summer? Holiday – booked; sun cream/travel insurance – bought; car serviced/ tires pumped-up – sorted; travel sickness pills for the kids – (oops) on the shopping list; fire alarm working – check; enclosures – ….what? We all make careful provision (some of us make lists) ahead of the traditional summer holiday, but do we pay equal attention to ensuring that our computer equipment will cope with a rise in temperature? Because high temperatures are a common cause of sensitive electrical and electronic components tripping or even failing. A tripped device can cause major disruption to production, and could cost your company tens or even hundreds of thousands of pounds per hour. The cost of catastrophic equipment failure is even higher as it means an extended period of downtime while replacement products are sourced and tted. Electrical equipment generates a lot of heat added to which will be the ambient heat from the environment the enclosure is situated, in which naturally increases in summer. ‒Karl Lycett, Rittal’s Product Manager for Climate offers advice on designing effective climate control systems. Are You Ready for the Summer? Really?? Believe it or not, temperatures inside the panel can get so high that there is a point at which re becomes a very real risk. If that happens, the impact can be huge, as was clearly illustrated recently when a re was reported at one of the production lines at a food manufacturer’s factory. As yet neither the extent nor the cause has been fully determined but one thing is for sure, there will have been signi cant unexpected, unplanned and unbudgeted costs – some measurable some not. These include the cost of lost production due to the interruption, the cost of the repair to put right, the cost of the equipment replacement, and last by not least, the cost to the customer for loss of sales and the cost to the employer’s reputation. The Cost of Failure Enclosures, and in particular enclosure climate control, may not be top of your busy priority list but have you ever wondered what you would do if the equipment that manages your production line - your PLCs, drives and controls - failed due to inadequate or inappropriate cooling? Have you wondered how much might get spent and totted up the costs - both tangible and intangible? And how much the lifespan of this sensitive equipment is shortened with the consequent replacement cost? And, and, and. You may consider your equipment safe from the perils of a signi cant re. After all, drives trip out automatically at set excess temperatures and there might be re suppression installed. But why let it get that far, when you can have the equipment surveyed and advice provided from a quali ed engineer, for free? To put the amount of heat produced by electrical devices into context, consider your inverter drives. More and more are being used within electrical equipment because they are very effective at reducing the amount of energy used – which means lower production costs. Assuming an ef ciency of 97 per cent, a 250kW drive can produce up to 7.5kW of heat, much of which is retained inside the enclosure in which it’s installed. And as I indicated, life expectancy of components is also affected by excess heat. An electrical component’s life expectancy is reduced by 50% for every 10°C increase in the ambient temperature.
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