ACS880 and SR motor delivery 50% power saving for feed mill

Replacing a fixed speed ventilator drive and damper control with and SR motor and variable speed ACS880 drive delivered a power saving of 50% on a 75 kW application.

Since 2011 a UFA poultry feed mill built in 1965 has been one of only a few unmanned feed mills in the world. The mill runs from 9 p.m. until 5 a.m. without any operating personnel.

Mechanical engineer Peter Hofer is a member of management and responsible for the entire production of UFA. Using power as efficiently as possible for UFA’s large production volume is important for him and the company – for reasons of cost and for the sake of principle: “You can do a lot to efficiently use energy if you analyse the processes accurately,” stresses Hofer.

Replacing fixed-speed motor

Working with the Bühler Technology Group, UFA has been particularly successful in optimizing processes at its Sursee feed mill. The energy savings mean the investment pays for itself in just a few years. Until 2015, an aspiration ventilator was installed with a conventional 75 kW induction motor. This ventilator dehumidifies and cools the steamed, pelleted feed before it is packed. For this, it draws the air through the material to be dried from the tenth floor of the production tower. The ventilation was controlled simply via a flap; the motor directly coupled to the power grid always operates at fixed speed.

Although state of the art when it was installed in the 1980s, it needed to be replaced. Peter Hofer sat down with experts from Bühler to explore the potential efficiency improvements that renovating the ventilation system with an ABB drive package using a highly efficient synchronous reluctance motor a frequency inverter. Together, they first thoroughly inspected the process of measuring the power of the motor until a 37-kilowatt (kW) ABB synchronous reluctance motor was installed for the drive of the new aspiration ventilator, controlled by an ABB ACS880 frequency inverter.

50% power saving

The ventilation system has proven itself completely. It runs five to six days a week around the clock, all year round. On average, the motor draws an electrical output of 14 kW from the inverter, saving around 50% power compared to the previous system. It is around 300 megawatt-hours in this system alone, and the reduced CO2 emissions are also considerable. Additional positive side effects, such as a reduced need for cooling in the control cabinet, reduced space requirements, and savings due to the smaller size of the motor, have not yet been considered in this analysis.

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