To help prevent unplanned outages and costly damage to electrical equipment in a Hartlepool-based pipe mill, power quality specialist CP Automation supplied Tata Steel with seven SineTamer devices. The new units will help clean up the AC waveform supplying the electrical equipment on-site and continue to offer protection after incidents occur.
Tata Steel’s Hartlepool facility is one of several downstream sites across the UK. It receives the raw materials from the company’s Port Talbot site in South Wales, which the team uses to produce steel pipes. On the site, Tata Steel has a 20” pipe mill with an annual production capacity of 220,000 tonnes of tube products. It can produce these pipes for various markets, including construction, engineering, oil and gas and energy infrastructure.
Following a significant investment in 2017 that introduced over 20 VSDs, it conducted a power quality study, finding sufficient capacity for the new drives. However, the facility still faced frequent unplanned outages caused by transients on the AC supply, which damaged drives. To investigate, the team invited independent power management consultant Steve Young MIET to its site and performed a two-week study, using a SineTamer during the second week as a test. SineTamer is a transient voltage surge suppression (TVSS) device that protects AC drives, VSDs and other sensitive electrical systems.
“We connected the SineTamer to the same supply and recorded no further transients in that second week,” explained Denis Jennings, senior project engineer – electrical at Tata Steel Europe. “It was clear SineTamer would be very beneficial and had already improved the quality of the incoming supply.”
Through CP Automation, Tata Steel purchased seven SineTamer devices. These included one CP18-LAY2 voltage disturbance filter, a compact unit that can limit internally generated transients, as well as lightning- and utility company-induced surges. It also procured six CP-RM-ST503N4 surge protective devices (SPDs). It fitted the CP18-LAY2 to the main incoming supply, the drive suite previously affected by the outages. It then fitted the smaller units downstream on the individual drive supplies.
“Not only can SineTamers take multiple hits and continue protecting once an incident has occurred, but they also minimise let-through voltage,” added John Mitchell, global sales and marketing director at CP Automation. “Tata Steel needed to keep its pipe production online — and there was no doubt SineTamer was the device for the job.”
“Several months on and the difference is night and day,” continued Jennings. “Outages are minimal and, when an issue does occur, devices like the AC, DC and variable speed drives recover far quicker and with minimal disruption. We’ve gone from having a chopped-up AC waveform to a very smooth one, and the impact has been remarkable.”
For more information about SineTamer and surge protective devices, visit the CP Automation website and download the product datasheets for free.
