In this industry, 80%of the applications are pumps but more than 50% of energy consumption is in aeration. We continue our series with properly sizing your VFD for your pump or aeration application. On this episode of the ABB Solutions Podcast, Mike Murphy is joined by Jeff Bergman, business development manager for municipal and industrial water wastewater. Jeff discusses what kind of concerns you should be aware of when pairing a motor and a drive as well as what steps you should take to find the right drive for your motor.
Learn more about Variable Speed Drives
Try the Drives product configuration tool
In this industry, 80%of the applications are pumps but more than 50% of energy consumption is in aeration. We continue our series with properly sizing your VFD for your pump or aeration application. On this episode of the ABB Solutions Podcast, Mike Murphy is joined by Jeff Bergman, business development manager for municipal and industrial water wastewater. Jeff discusses what kind of concerns you should be aware of when pairing a motor and a drive as well as what steps you should take to find the right drive for your motor.
Learn more about Variable Speed Drives
Try the Drives product configuration tool
Welcome to another ABB solutions podcast episode. I'm your host, Mike Murphy, speaking to you out of Greenville, South Carolina. Our current series has been focused on the water wastewater industry. And in our last episode, we discussed the benefits of using variable frequency drives in pumping applications. in this industry, 80% of the applications are pumps, but over 50% of energy consumption is in aeration. So we continue our series with properly sizing the VFD for your pump or aeration application. With us today, we have Jeff Bergman, Business Development Manager for Municipal and Industrial Water Wastewater. Welcome, Jeff. Thanks, Mike. Glad to be here. great having you. All right, Jeff, we hear terms like constant and variable torque, can you first review these two types of applications? And then discuss which ones we'll encounter in this industry?
Jeff Bergman:Yeah, that's a great question, because we actually get that question a lot. You know, when you're, when you're looking at the way that the VFDs are applied, your biggest energy savings are with variable torque loads, because you use a little bit of energy to get a little bit of flow; use a lot more energy to get a lot of flow. So we can usually turn down the variable torque loads. And variable torque loads or any kind of pump or blower that is centrifugal. Submersible styles, and all of those are also. And then a constant torque application will be anything that like a sludge pump, or a type of a pump, a peristaltic, pump, a gear pump, or something like that, that moves a consistent volume, based off of how it rotates or pushes it through the line.
Mike Murphy:We all know a drive can save energy. So why not just put a VFD on every motor in your plant
Unknown:Well, Mike you'd make me very happy if we did that. But you know, it doesn't make a lot of sense to put a VFD on every single motor out there in the industry, because sometimes we turn a motor on it might not need to vary speed. It might not all even add any value to be able to control it. So, for example, if we're transferring water from one tank to another, you turn the pump on and it maybe run six or eight hours at a time. That really doesn't add any value using a VFD. Now you could do some calculations to decide, you know, if you do it at six hours at this energy rate, and you do it at seven hours of this energy rate, is it really an energy savings? You've got to look at your ability or what you need in the process to control it. You also want to look at, does it really make sense? Sometimes a soft starter might be really all you need to start or stop or control that pumper or blower.
Mike Murphy:So we know many of these applications, we're going to be discussing a variable torque. I now understand I need a drive, what's my next step?
Jeff Bergman:When we size a drive, you're actually sizing the drive to run a motor. And we really do care about the type of application you're applying to whether it's a blower or a pump, or a bell press or whatever you're connected to. But the most important information you can tell us is the is the actual nameplate on the motor. One of the things that if you look at my cell phone, you'll notice there's pictures of my wife and my kids, but also I got lots of pictures of motor nameplates. And that's because that tells me a lot of information about the pump or application that I'm sizing it for. So that's a very, very important part because when we size a VFD for a motor, I don't really care about the horsepower. What I'm really looking for is the is the amperage rating, how much current does that load need to run. And then we apply that through the VFD, because if the VFD's actually developing that current and voltage to that motor needs to run that application. You know, some of the other things that you probably want to keep aware of when you're doing that though, like when you're applying a VFD, you want to look at not only making sure you're sizing right, also make sure that your overload capabilities are sized correctly. We talked about constant torque and variable torque, what we see in variable torque applications is the need for about 110% overload. And that's because pumping is actually from our point of view, a pretty easy application. Even when you've got a wastewater, moving around inside of the pump. But if you're pumping higher solids contents, you're using a bar screen or progressive cavity pump, or those kinds of things, that needs a little bit more overload because it's sometimes a little bit harder to operate and run in normal operation. So, in that case, we need a little bit of a higher overload setting and that's where more of that constant torque application setting would be. You also always want to make sure you're taking care of the enclosure rate. You know we don't want to mount a drive that's designed for indoor use, outside. It will see a lot of times where you'll mount a VFD that's rated for an outdoor enclosure inside because there's a lot of moisture, or a huge amount of dust, dirt and debris floating around and flying around in the plants. So you always want to do everything you can do to protect the electronics in the VFD. You get much longer life out of it a little more robust installation by watching out for all of those different things.
Mike Murphy:Alright, so I can only imagine some of these facilities are pretty old, right? You might have motors that might be 20 years or even more. What kind of concern should we be aware of prior to pairing a motor to a drive?
Jeff Bergman:The age of a lot of water and wastewater facilities across the United States varies from some of them as much as 100 years old, to some of the more newer recent ones being built. And you've got some concerns on some earlier equipment or some older equipment. You know, just first of all, we'll start talking about the motor itself. The motor windings inside of the motor itself might be toward the end of their life. You might need to rewind the motor or get it rewound. Also keeping up with the bearings in both the motor and in the pumps and seals in those pumps, you always want to be sure that those are newer, fresher, because when you're varying the speed, you put a little bit of a different load on the motor in the in the bearings and seals in there. So you always want to make sure you're accommodating that. And some of the things you've got to be very concerned about, very aware of, are the length of the motor cable, and that's the distance from that VFD to the motor that it's connected to. It might be 100 feet or 150 feet. If that motor is put down on a well, it might be you know, two or 300 or 500 feet away. So you've got some issues with the output generated by that VFD, maybe affecting the life of that motor. And in those cases that might need additional filtering like a dV/dT filter. You might have a common load filter or a big sine wave filter. And those are mainly to protect that motor; make that motor last longer. Because when you've got it in a deep well, it's expensive to pull back out. When you've got a big motor, it's an expensive acquisition; it's expensive capital expenditure, and you want to make sure that you're going to give it the longest life it can. So not only do we have an aging infrastructure, we also want that structure, infrastructure to last longer and give us the most value for our buck.
Mike Murphy:I know ABB has a lot of types of drives. But isn't a drive a drive? Don't they pretty much do the same thing. For example, is there really a difference in the type of drive you'd see in like a general industrial or HVAC?
Jeff Bergman:Well, and you wouldn't believe how many times a day I get that question from engineers and end users. Because they do say "Hey, a drive is a drive". And it's kind of a misnomer because everybody makes drives a little bit differently. I mean, we all control the speed of the motor. But some VFDs have longer motor cable runs and can run a motor and a longer cable on. Some VFD manufacturers have different communication modules inside of them. For example, you're on an industrial application or building, you're having a building management system, or you're operating with the SCADA system inside of a water wastewater facility, you might need to have a different protocol for communications. So each of those drives has a different protocol. Each of those drives has different, out, the way it runs. For industrial we might be if you're in a rock crusher, you're much more interested or concerned with torque. With the development of the force to break the rocks, or the long conveyor belts for mining and in backhoes, and those kinds of things. So for HVAC, very different because you're you're typically on fans, you're blowing air, you're maybe pumping chilled water loops, and those kind of things. And then in the water and wastewater, you're typically you're gonna pump water, clean water, you're gonna pump dirty water, you're going to press that sludge that's developed. So there's a lot of different applications and different requirements and different enclosure ratings. And as a result of that, we end up as all manufacturers in the industry, we end up with two or three different VFD lines, a general industrial line, and then an hv AC line, and then the water and wastewater one.
Mike Murphy:So Jeff, you mentioned SCADA, what does that mean? Is that anything like SCUBA?
Jeff Bergman:Well, it's not a Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. But it's a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition. It's actually the network that controls a water wastewater facility. Typically in a wastewater plant or a water plant, you've got a chief operator and he sits in a room with a bunch of computers on the system. And he's looking at the demand that the system, that people are using water or they're generating wastewater and shipping it back into the plant. And this is his ability to look at how fast it's coming in for the wastewater or how fast it's going out for the water. And it allows him to kind of do the supervisory to look at it and see, hey, I need to you know, get more pumps on line for more clean water. I need to maybe bump the aeration up of my wastewater because I've got a little bit more stuff coming in. So, each of those industrial drives have different communication protocols. As I said, HVAC uses a network called BACnet in water wastewater, we typically use a protocol for SCADA using different communication ways that we transfer that data. And then industrially we've got 10 or 12 other networks that VFDs work on and communicate on.
Mike Murphy:What type of protection features would a drive see or or would you want to make sure a drive has in this industry?
Jeff Bergman:You know, that's that's a very great question because we get that a lot there. For industrial, you know, you're going to want to protect a lot of different things and you have a lot of seal ratings and and those are people personnel protection. In the water wastewater industry and in pumping applications, we have a lot of things we want to protect not only the people, we also want to protect the equipment. We put a lot of pump protective features inside of the VFD that the keep debris from building up on the impeller by running a pump clean algorithm that rotates the impeller back and forth. It dislodges strings and debris, that buildup on the impellers. We have the ability to pre-decide if we're going to see cavitation in a pump. So because cavitation creates small air bubbles that actually will degrade the impeller and cause it to actually disintegrate, the way it operates in to there. You also have applications where if a well is running dry, there might not be enough water for the pump to pump and then it has no way to cool itself or lubricate itself, and it could actually burn itself up. So we've got dry pump protection for no flow or low flow conditions on that. So, there's a lot of protective features inside of the VFD to help protect the load that is applied to the application that's applied to. And it's not only just personnel protection for fault short circuits, but it's also protecting the equipment itself.
Mike Murphy:Okay, great. You've been giving us a lot of good information. So Jeff, I've got one last question. The term resilience comes up a lot. What does resiliency mean? And second, how does ABB help with this issue?
Jeff Bergman:You know, resilience is a very big thing. And the way we would typically use that in our day to day, discussions will be more like backup or your secondary controls. You know, we, you know, I live in Florida, and we have a lot of hurricanes. So there's a condition that if we have a hurricane, we might lose power. And if we lose power, we've got to have a backup generator for power. So resiliency is the same way because if we want clean water, or we want the wastewater moving away from our homes, we've got to be able to power these and operate them in pretty much any kind of condition that's, that's going on. So we end up with a resilient system where we have our primary system, which is utility power in the SCADA system. But if we have a significant hurricane hit, or we have another rain event, or weather event or tornado or something, we might lose either utility power, and or, our communications, our SCADA system. So if we lose that, we need to have the ability to operate and control because we don't want the wastewater coming back in everybody's homes. We want it going away into the plants. And we also want to have good clean, safe water coming into their houses. So, resiliency has, we have a lot of controls built into the drive that say, okay, if I lose the SCADA, I'll automatically turn over to this backup system, and I'll control the VFD watching for pressure flow, making sure that I still keep the wastewater flowing out or the water, clean water flowing back in. That really makes a difference. And, and sometimes you'll even have even a third backup system. So that you know, if you have your primary system fails, your secondary system has a catastrophe, you've got a manual system where the guys can go through and manually with flow switches turn it off when it well gets high, or turn it on when the well gets low. You've got those different capabilities too. So resiliency, not only with the aging infrastructure resiliency means that that aging infrastructure will support us in any kind of adverse conditions.
Mike Murphy:Okay, great. All right. So that is all the time we have. Jeff, thank you so much for talking with us on Properly Sizing Your VFD for Your Pump or Aeration Application. Remember, if you would like more information on ABB drives, contact your local ABB sales representative or if you have any other questions or comments regarding a podcast series, visit us at us-solutions@abb.com. Thanks and have a great rest of your day.