Schneider Electric UK has announced the launch of its first service oriented, intelligent drives family called Altivar Process to enable plant owners to fine-tune their  machine performance and energy optimisation.

The Altivar Process has been designed to answer three key needs of today’s plant managers and operators, namely – increased operational effectiveness and faster productivity, better environmental sustainability so users can do more with less; and finally the need to reduce downtime and increase asset availability and flexibility.

By adding new levels of digital intelligence to the even the smallest ratings enables users to make  informed decisions about their operation of their entire plant on a line-by-line and machine basis, in order to increase flexibility, reduce downtime by identifying faults, speed up processes; and ultimately reduce a plant’s carbon footprint.

Developed for manufacturing and process industry sectors, including food & beverage, water and waste-water, mining, minerals and materials, oil and gas, and general manufacturing,  the Altivar Process will help factory owners, plant managers and engineers better manage their processes for performance and efficiently.

For example, the performance of an operating pump is affected when it operates away from its best efficiency point  (BEP). The likely effects are low efficiency, noise and vibration giving reduced life to bearings and temperature rise due to dissipated energy created by low efficiency.

Altivar Process, with embedded process control, helps digitalise processes by allowing information to be extracted via the drive, from the device.  The Altivar Process would display the pump curves of each individual pump based on the flow rate, head and how efficiently the pump is pumping, informing the user of any drift detection from its best efficiency point (BEP).

According to Schneider Electric, making these informed decisions offers saving a further 8 per cent on total life-cycle cost of the device itself. Altivar Process also alerts users to faults and shows operators exactly where and when a fault has occurred and why, reducing expensive downtime spent fault-finding. This not only helps with predictive maintenance and allows manufacturers and engineers to make quicker business decisions.

The Altivar Process will be available in ratings from 0.75 kW from July 2014 at 999 Inverters.co.uk