POWER QUALITY IS A MULTIPLE SOLUTION TASK
A presentation by John Jackman at the 2006 International Power Quality Convention
I am here today to correct some misconceptions about Power Quality that seem to be the accepted ideas with respect to secondary power. Sadly, this very subject is even being incorrectly taught at the best colleges, universities and technical schools everywhere. I am gearing this presentation so that anyone will be able to understand the problems and the solutions available. My apologies ahead of time for those of you who came for an advanced technical presentation. We can do that another time.
In 1984 the Government Services Administration of the United States decided not to purchase power capacitors to correct Power Factor Error. The reason given was that the quality of manufacture was so poor in comparison to capacitors made decades earlier, they would no longer waste government money on such low quality items. For twenty years, that has been the official position of Federal Purchasing.
This was the natural assumption since Power Factor Capacitors were burning up at a rate which offset the financial benefits derived by the correction.
Fact is, they were totally wrong. But it was a natural assumption. What used to last ten or twenty years was now burning out in one or two years. But the condition has grown. By the new millennium power capacitors are routinely going out in under a year. It was a simple assumption that newly made power capacitors were inferior to past models.
What was really happening has grown to become a major problem which now effects absolutely everything using secondary power. There was nothing wrong with the quality of capacitors then or now. But high frequency harmonic distortion will and does systematically destroy any insulation, including the tough mylar and/or propolene insulating materials effecting not only capacitors but everything else.
Today we find ourselves in a position not even understood by the new generation of manufacturers, educators, or the general public. Over the years, maintenance people have been replaced until today’s operators are not even aware of what past electrical quality conditions were even like twenty years ago or before. It is now considered normal for motors to run hot and burn up in a few years. No one notices that dry transformers over heat. Electronic component burn up is considered the norm. It is accepted as typical that fluorescent and high pressure lighting will buzz and generate noise.
None of those conditions are normal at all. And today I am asking this body of people who are here to be a part of the Power Quality issue, to do something about it and become the catalyst to bring this deplorable condition to an end. It is costing our entire society trillions of dollars and the causes and solutions are not even known by most.
It is really about education. I grant that many of you here know about this problem but may be frustrated with what to do about it. However, the greater percentage of you who hear my voice really know little about this subject and what you do know is mostly wrong. And that is true only because you have been misled. The basic ideas about Power Quality that I hear from every sector are misleading and misinformed. But here is a wakeup call, Almost all manufacturers in the west are wasting about 30% of their electrical power, and for no good reason at all.
I am going to make a statement that needs your attention. (1) POWER QUALITY IS NOT ABOUT ONE PROBLEM BUT MANY. FAILING TO DEAL WITH MOST OF THEM WILL DOOM ANY REASONABLE ATTEMPT TO RESOLVE THIS CONDITION. I am going to repeat that again.
For the sake of brevity I will address only two of the causes today. And these problems must be looked at together - Power Factor Error and Harmonic Distortion.
First, Power Factor Error. All wire wound devices create some measure of inductive reaction. The coils create a magnetic force which is multiplied with each wind. Every single loop creates its’ own special force which cuts across the loops of every other winding. Therefore, every wire loop is interfering with every other loop, INDUCING each magnetic flux over and over upon itself. This inductive resistance is special. It actually causes the current trying to flow through the coils to pass slightly late, and behind voltage. To even have power, they must be together. Motors, transformers, chokes. . . all of them add to the inductive current slow down. The result is this:
(3)Here are two sinewaves representing alternating current. The horizontal line is time. One is voltage. The other is current. Voltage comes and goes normally enough. But note that the current sine-wave depicted here is not in time with the voltage wave. This is the result of inductive reactance.
But ohms law says that power in watts is the result of multiplying voltage with amperage or current. Unless both are present together, there is no power available. This condition, which exists everywhere has multiple detractions. Look at the illustration. Where the current is present to the right without voltage, this is absolute waste without any benefit at all. While this part of the sinewave is passing, the meter is still turning! You are paying for that power and it is current that you can’t even use. There is no voltage present to make it work! If your PFE is in the mid 70’s, you are wasting an average of about 14% of the power you pay for. Correcting this condition will simply drop your power consumption by at least 10%. Because now, you are not paying for lost current. With the precious cost of energy, how would you like to drop the cost of your entire electrical operation by at least 10%?
But I present to you that this is not even the greatest cause of your energy losses. Let’s look at the sinewave again. (4) Remember that power is only derived when voltage and current are used together. This area in the middle where the two are overlapping represents the only way electrical power is even available to you. The average factory in America and elsewhere has a Power Factor in the low 70s, sometimes referred to as COSINE THETA or the slope comparing real with reactive power.
When PFE is that low, a motor will put out only about half of its’ rated torque. Let’s take a hypothetical example. You may have a 100Hp motor in your building, and you are using and paying for electricity of a 100Hp motor. But with the typical PFE, you are only getting the work of roughly a 50Hp motor. For the price of the current that passed through the building, which you are paying for, you are getting only half the work done. Air conditioning systems are on twice as long to move half as much air. Conveyer belts move half as much product as they were designed for. Everything is operating at half of what it should.
Most industrialists already know about this fact but just put the blame in the wrong place. It is common for me to hear customers complain that the salesperson who sold them their equipment said it would do more work than it does. They attest this to sales dishonesty. But it isn’t true.
Back home, a salt processing company was forced to put in motors twice as large to get the production they had to have which the machines they bought could not put out. They believed the engineer that designed the system didn’t know what he was doing. Their Power Factor Error was .69. Had it been .98 those machines would have put out what they were specified. Doubling the horsepower, and therefore the energy used, was just admitting that everything was working at half capacity. Sure it was! Voltage and current were not together! How could a motor work as it was intended?
If you were shocked at wasting only 10% of your power due to Power Factor Error, consider what you are losing with all your motors doing only half of what they should and could. I can’t tell you your losses are 50% because everything using power is not just motors. But for nearly all manufacturing facilities the total loss is certainly higher than 20% over all. Ladies and gentlemen, this is an international disaster! Nobody can afford such losses, even if energy were cheap; and it isn’t. ELIMINATING POWER FACTOR ERROR IS A MUST!! Not doing that is hurting everyone.
Even if you did not care about the cost of lost power, consider the effect upon our environment to be wasting from 20% to 30% of our energy resources! 20+% more pollution. 20+% more coal and oil thrown away, and 20+% fewer rolling brownouts. There is an interesting subject. I propose to you that if California could reduce their power consumption by even 10% or so, there would be no rolling brownouts at all. And how would all of us like to have another 20% extra power capacity available to us? The benefits just multiply.
So why don’t we just fix this? Poor information. Business owners and accountants don’t even know what Power Factor Error is. And with that, our industrial society for the most part is not even aware of these enormous losses. I can go into almost any building and look at their electric bill and few know anything about that Power Factor penalty they ignorantly pay to their local utility.
Second, the inexpensive and practical answer to it has become lost over time, and partly because of false blame. I am speaking of Power Capacitors. But the cost of capacitor replacement is similar to the savings enjoyed right? Truth is, even if you buy new ones every year, the benefits well overturn the losses paid for replacement. But let’s look at what destroys them, not in how they are made. Solve that, and the new capacitors will last as long as the old ones did. Are you with me on this subject?
You are still in disbelief about my telling you about the average 20% to 30% loss from PFE. There is more. And this time the economic losses are even higher. –Yes they are!!
(5) Here is that sinewave again. And for the sake of clarity will not get into the complication of voltage and current apart from each other. Here they are merged. We are looking at perfect Power Factor. We are going to look at the nastiest loss monster of all.
My first job out of college was in the broadcast television industry, we won’t get into how long ago that was. But suffice it to say that in the early 60s, the horizontal lines in the picture was taken from the 60 Hz frequency coming out of the AC wall plug. We called this the raster. Anybody here old enough to remember that?
And if your mom ran the mixer or the vacuum cleaner, the picture got snow in it. Yes? Well, that all went away by the mid 70s because no television set used the utility sinewave for the raster anymore. All of them put in power supplies to recreate a clean sinewave. (The internal power supply.)
But let’s look at what that power supply did to the power. (6) Nearly all power supplies only use most, but not all, of the available electricity. Where the sinewave is not efficient in the up and down swing portion, the power supply simply does not even use it until it reaches a more efficient condition. It literally just lops off the top and bottom of the sinewave. (7) But the little bit that was not used is still there to roam around inside the circuit. And look how wide that small part is. It is only the size of say a tiny 400 Hz signal. . . that may be only 10 to 30 volts! Who can use power like that? Nobody!
But that TV is putting out this waste continually and it is just banging into itself making more odd frequencies and growing. But it does not end there does it? Computers, Printers, monitors, calculators, electronic controls, almost everything that demands accuracy now has a power supply. If it is not inside the equipment, they send you a little cube that will plug into it. Nothing electronic will trust the plug in the wall anymore. And for very good reason.
Every one of these little devices are adding their share to the Harmonic Distortion soup. They create what they are trying to avoid. Even our lighting. Ballasted fixtures, in a slightly different way create more harmonic distortion. And where can all this electrical waste go? You can’t use it, so it is driven out one way or another as it saturates your building.
Most of it is detectable in your neutral. When was the last time you put an ammeter on a ground wire? I have often seen more power passing through ground than in the main hot leads!! Ever wondered why your ground wires and neutral buss has become dangerous? And if you did not know before, I promise you they most certainly are.
And the other fact is, they are actually far more dangerous than just your 60 Hz thinking ammeter is telling you. That clip on ammeter is not even looking at the power in the higher frequency levels. And, high frequency voltage and current is infinitely more dangerous and destructive the higher up it is found.
Aside from escaping through your ground and neutral conductors, this Harmonic waste also shows up as heat in all your equipment. It is the common cause for computers to lock up or distort data. It is the main destroyer of the insulation in motor windings. It is the direct cause of transformer and component failure. Some of it boils off as RF which explains why you cannot get a clean sound out of that AM radio station at work.
Let’s take a look at the Harmonic footprint of a typical building.(7) Here is a graph of harmonic frequencies up to 100 KHz. The two colors represent the amplitude of voltage and current levels at each frequency. Over here in the 70 KHz range you can see there is about half a volt. Everything from there up is enough power to poke a hole in mylar, polypropolene, vinyl, acrylic, or any other insulator. Even glass. THERE is the destroyer of your capacitors. THAT is the main reason to rewind your motors. THIS is the destroyer of your electronic circuits. HERE is the major cause of pitting in your burned out contactors and coils.
Millions of dollars are spent replacing lighting ballasts in our buildings because the fixture is making an obnoxious noise. There may be nothing wrong with that ballast. Most of the time it just has something that is affected by a powerful harmonic which is attacking it. Move it to another location and it will most likely be silent.
I don’t have anywhere near the time today to cover what we should, but let me make this statement as clear as I can. THERE ARE GOOD SOLUTIONS TO THESE PROBLEMS AND THE COST IS LOW. But for sure, failure to consider both Power Factor Error AND Harmonic distortion together will result in general failure to solve either one. They were created together, they must be eliminated together.
Believe it or not, I really came here just to help you. I am not a voice of doom and gloom. None of these problems are difficult, or expensive to resolve! We do not have to endure the kind of losses I have shown you. And they really are as bad as I have portrayed.
The solutions are simple. Here is a good rule. Rube Goldberg makes a point. The best solutions are ALWAYS the simple ones. Yes, I work for a company which makes answers. But let me show you what works. And tell you that you can build this yourself and sell it or use it for the benefit of all. I will show you a good design that takes care of both Power Factor Error and Harmonic distortion.
In this room let us come together. Let us alter our wasteful ways and clean up our secondary power quality headaches. And it begins here at this convention. This is the Power Quality meeting. We are the ones who can educate and change. You are here because you want answers and hope you get them. Ok, let’s look at one approach. And in this room are people who can, will, and must come up with more and better solutions than just this one. Are we agreed?
Here is one thing you can do: (8) This is a notch filter. You have seen this before. First year technical right? But look at this simple circuit in a new way. Maybe you did not think to make a big one instead of something small. What if these capacitors were 100KVARS and the reactor here could handle over 100A. And while we are in the neighborhood, let’s make the reactor a zig-zag transformer to stabilize voltage. What would you do with that?
There is a harmonic trap for a problem frequency with enough capacitive reactance to also offset some of the Power Factor Error. Now make another stage tuned to another harmonic and add to the PFE need. Then put a smart controller in place that reads PFE and brings in stages or takes them out as the Power Factor changes. This way, a bank of capacitors is not on at night when the building is not using power. Power Factor Error is just as bad leading as it is lagging.
Call this drawing one stage then do it again to call it another stage and so forth. Then in your Power Factor correcting, voltage stabilizing, simple harmonic correcting box, (9) put in the right kind of either active or passive harmonic filter to protect your capacitors. What have you got? This is a good answer to a complicated problem. A black box that works! A cheap device that saves your plant, office building, neighborhood or country at least 20% of what used to be pure waste.
No more motor rewinds. No burned up transformers. No more pitted contactors failing. No more capacitors burning out. No more circuits prematurely being destroyed.
Just for a moment let us digress back to that frequency analysis. (10) You know how a microwave oven works don’t you? Sure. An amplifier sends out a special frequency which just happens to be the resonant frequency of water. Only water heats up, not the container unless it is warmed by the hot water. Have you considered the fact that all substances have a resonant frequency like water?
Pick out that frequency and you can selectively heat up anything - right? No problem! Let’s take a look at this spectrum.
Up in this range at about 38 KHz is the resonant frequency for Iron. See that line right there? Throw some of that at a motor, transformer, choke or even the steel enclosure, and you can heat it up even if it is off!! Up here towards the top in the upper range is the resonant frequency for silicone. What is made of silicone? Glass! Diodes! Transistors, IC chips, everything electronic. This little harmonic is overheating all the electronics in your printers, and everything else. And this you will remember is a typical building. No wonder components burn up. They don’t even have to be on. The very power feeding it is slowly eating it away a little bit at a time.
Suddenly that 20% power waste is nothing next to the huge losses to everything that runs our society. Lets do something about it and do it now. (11)
I thank you for a moment of your time.
A presentation by John Jackman at the 2006 International Power Quality Convention
I am here today to correct some misconceptions about Power Quality that seem to be the accepted ideas with respect to secondary power. Sadly, this very subject is even being incorrectly taught at the best colleges, universities and technical schools everywhere. I am gearing this presentation so that anyone will be able to understand the problems and the solutions available. My apologies ahead of time for those of you who came for an advanced technical presentation. We can do that another time.
In 1984 the Government Services Administration of the United States decided not to purchase power capacitors to correct Power Factor Error. The reason given was that the quality of manufacture was so poor in comparison to capacitors made decades earlier, they would no longer waste government money on such low quality items. For twenty years, that has been the official position of Federal Purchasing.
This was the natural assumption since Power Factor Capacitors were burning up at a rate which offset the financial benefits derived by the correction.
Fact is, they were totally wrong. But it was a natural assumption. What used to last ten or twenty years was now burning out in one or two years. But the condition has grown. By the new millennium power capacitors are routinely going out in under a year. It was a simple assumption that newly made power capacitors were inferior to past models.
What was really happening has grown to become a major problem which now effects absolutely everything using secondary power. There was nothing wrong with the quality of capacitors then or now. But high frequency harmonic distortion will and does systematically destroy any insulation, including the tough mylar and/or propolene insulating materials effecting not only capacitors but everything else.
Today we find ourselves in a position not even understood by the new generation of manufacturers, educators, or the general public. Over the years, maintenance people have been replaced until today’s operators are not even aware of what past electrical quality conditions were even like twenty years ago or before. It is now considered normal for motors to run hot and burn up in a few years. No one notices that dry transformers over heat. Electronic component burn up is considered the norm. It is accepted as typical that fluorescent and high pressure lighting will buzz and generate noise.
None of those conditions are normal at all. And today I am asking this body of people who are here to be a part of the Power Quality issue, to do something about it and become the catalyst to bring this deplorable condition to an end. It is costing our entire society trillions of dollars and the causes and solutions are not even known by most.
It is really about education. I grant that many of you here know about this problem but may be frustrated with what to do about it. However, the greater percentage of you who hear my voice really know little about this subject and what you do know is mostly wrong. And that is true only because you have been misled. The basic ideas about Power Quality that I hear from every sector are misleading and misinformed. But here is a wakeup call, Almost all manufacturers in the west are wasting about 30% of their electrical power, and for no good reason at all.
I am going to make a statement that needs your attention. (1) POWER QUALITY IS NOT ABOUT ONE PROBLEM BUT MANY. FAILING TO DEAL WITH MOST OF THEM WILL DOOM ANY REASONABLE ATTEMPT TO RESOLVE THIS CONDITION. I am going to repeat that again.
For the sake of brevity I will address only two of the causes today. And these problems must be looked at together - Power Factor Error and Harmonic Distortion.
First, Power Factor Error. All wire wound devices create some measure of inductive reaction. The coils create a magnetic force which is multiplied with each wind. Every single loop creates its’ own special force which cuts across the loops of every other winding. Therefore, every wire loop is interfering with every other loop, INDUCING each magnetic flux over and over upon itself. This inductive resistance is special. It actually causes the current trying to flow through the coils to pass slightly late, and behind voltage. To even have power, they must be together. Motors, transformers, chokes. . . all of them add to the inductive current slow down. The result is this:
(3)Here are two sinewaves representing alternating current. The horizontal line is time. One is voltage. The other is current. Voltage comes and goes normally enough. But note that the current sine-wave depicted here is not in time with the voltage wave. This is the result of inductive reactance.
But ohms law says that power in watts is the result of multiplying voltage with amperage or current. Unless both are present together, there is no power available. This condition, which exists everywhere has multiple detractions. Look at the illustration. Where the current is present to the right without voltage, this is absolute waste without any benefit at all. While this part of the sinewave is passing, the meter is still turning! You are paying for that power and it is current that you can’t even use. There is no voltage present to make it work! If your PFE is in the mid 70’s, you are wasting an average of about 14% of the power you pay for. Correcting this condition will simply drop your power consumption by at least 10%. Because now, you are not paying for lost current. With the precious cost of energy, how would you like to drop the cost of your entire electrical operation by at least 10%?
But I present to you that this is not even the greatest cause of your energy losses. Let’s look at the sinewave again. (4) Remember that power is only derived when voltage and current are used together. This area in the middle where the two are overlapping represents the only way electrical power is even available to you. The average factory in America and elsewhere has a Power Factor in the low 70s, sometimes referred to as COSINE THETA or the slope comparing real with reactive power.
When PFE is that low, a motor will put out only about half of its’ rated torque. Let’s take a hypothetical example. You may have a 100Hp motor in your building, and you are using and paying for electricity of a 100Hp motor. But with the typical PFE, you are only getting the work of roughly a 50Hp motor. For the price of the current that passed through the building, which you are paying for, you are getting only half the work done. Air conditioning systems are on twice as long to move half as much air. Conveyer belts move half as much product as they were designed for. Everything is operating at half of what it should.
Most industrialists already know about this fact but just put the blame in the wrong place. It is common for me to hear customers complain that the salesperson who sold them their equipment said it would do more work than it does. They attest this to sales dishonesty. But it isn’t true.
Back home, a salt processing company was forced to put in motors twice as large to get the production they had to have which the machines they bought could not put out. They believed the engineer that designed the system didn’t know what he was doing. Their Power Factor Error was .69. Had it been .98 those machines would have put out what they were specified. Doubling the horsepower, and therefore the energy used, was just admitting that everything was working at half capacity. Sure it was! Voltage and current were not together! How could a motor work as it was intended?
If you were shocked at wasting only 10% of your power due to Power Factor Error, consider what you are losing with all your motors doing only half of what they should and could. I can’t tell you your losses are 50% because everything using power is not just motors. But for nearly all manufacturing facilities the total loss is certainly higher than 20% over all. Ladies and gentlemen, this is an international disaster! Nobody can afford such losses, even if energy were cheap; and it isn’t. ELIMINATING POWER FACTOR ERROR IS A MUST!! Not doing that is hurting everyone.
Even if you did not care about the cost of lost power, consider the effect upon our environment to be wasting from 20% to 30% of our energy resources! 20+% more pollution. 20+% more coal and oil thrown away, and 20+% fewer rolling brownouts. There is an interesting subject. I propose to you that if California could reduce their power consumption by even 10% or so, there would be no rolling brownouts at all. And how would all of us like to have another 20% extra power capacity available to us? The benefits just multiply.
So why don’t we just fix this? Poor information. Business owners and accountants don’t even know what Power Factor Error is. And with that, our industrial society for the most part is not even aware of these enormous losses. I can go into almost any building and look at their electric bill and few know anything about that Power Factor penalty they ignorantly pay to their local utility.
Second, the inexpensive and practical answer to it has become lost over time, and partly because of false blame. I am speaking of Power Capacitors. But the cost of capacitor replacement is similar to the savings enjoyed right? Truth is, even if you buy new ones every year, the benefits well overturn the losses paid for replacement. But let’s look at what destroys them, not in how they are made. Solve that, and the new capacitors will last as long as the old ones did. Are you with me on this subject?
You are still in disbelief about my telling you about the average 20% to 30% loss from PFE. There is more. And this time the economic losses are even higher. –Yes they are!!
(5) Here is that sinewave again. And for the sake of clarity will not get into the complication of voltage and current apart from each other. Here they are merged. We are looking at perfect Power Factor. We are going to look at the nastiest loss monster of all.
My first job out of college was in the broadcast television industry, we won’t get into how long ago that was. But suffice it to say that in the early 60s, the horizontal lines in the picture was taken from the 60 Hz frequency coming out of the AC wall plug. We called this the raster. Anybody here old enough to remember that?
And if your mom ran the mixer or the vacuum cleaner, the picture got snow in it. Yes? Well, that all went away by the mid 70s because no television set used the utility sinewave for the raster anymore. All of them put in power supplies to recreate a clean sinewave. (The internal power supply.)
But let’s look at what that power supply did to the power. (6) Nearly all power supplies only use most, but not all, of the available electricity. Where the sinewave is not efficient in the up and down swing portion, the power supply simply does not even use it until it reaches a more efficient condition. It literally just lops off the top and bottom of the sinewave. (7) But the little bit that was not used is still there to roam around inside the circuit. And look how wide that small part is. It is only the size of say a tiny 400 Hz signal. . . that may be only 10 to 30 volts! Who can use power like that? Nobody!
But that TV is putting out this waste continually and it is just banging into itself making more odd frequencies and growing. But it does not end there does it? Computers, Printers, monitors, calculators, electronic controls, almost everything that demands accuracy now has a power supply. If it is not inside the equipment, they send you a little cube that will plug into it. Nothing electronic will trust the plug in the wall anymore. And for very good reason.
Every one of these little devices are adding their share to the Harmonic Distortion soup. They create what they are trying to avoid. Even our lighting. Ballasted fixtures, in a slightly different way create more harmonic distortion. And where can all this electrical waste go? You can’t use it, so it is driven out one way or another as it saturates your building.
Most of it is detectable in your neutral. When was the last time you put an ammeter on a ground wire? I have often seen more power passing through ground than in the main hot leads!! Ever wondered why your ground wires and neutral buss has become dangerous? And if you did not know before, I promise you they most certainly are.
And the other fact is, they are actually far more dangerous than just your 60 Hz thinking ammeter is telling you. That clip on ammeter is not even looking at the power in the higher frequency levels. And, high frequency voltage and current is infinitely more dangerous and destructive the higher up it is found.
Aside from escaping through your ground and neutral conductors, this Harmonic waste also shows up as heat in all your equipment. It is the common cause for computers to lock up or distort data. It is the main destroyer of the insulation in motor windings. It is the direct cause of transformer and component failure. Some of it boils off as RF which explains why you cannot get a clean sound out of that AM radio station at work.
Let’s take a look at the Harmonic footprint of a typical building.(7) Here is a graph of harmonic frequencies up to 100 KHz. The two colors represent the amplitude of voltage and current levels at each frequency. Over here in the 70 KHz range you can see there is about half a volt. Everything from there up is enough power to poke a hole in mylar, polypropolene, vinyl, acrylic, or any other insulator. Even glass. THERE is the destroyer of your capacitors. THAT is the main reason to rewind your motors. THIS is the destroyer of your electronic circuits. HERE is the major cause of pitting in your burned out contactors and coils.
Millions of dollars are spent replacing lighting ballasts in our buildings because the fixture is making an obnoxious noise. There may be nothing wrong with that ballast. Most of the time it just has something that is affected by a powerful harmonic which is attacking it. Move it to another location and it will most likely be silent.
I don’t have anywhere near the time today to cover what we should, but let me make this statement as clear as I can. THERE ARE GOOD SOLUTIONS TO THESE PROBLEMS AND THE COST IS LOW. But for sure, failure to consider both Power Factor Error AND Harmonic distortion together will result in general failure to solve either one. They were created together, they must be eliminated together.
Believe it or not, I really came here just to help you. I am not a voice of doom and gloom. None of these problems are difficult, or expensive to resolve! We do not have to endure the kind of losses I have shown you. And they really are as bad as I have portrayed.
The solutions are simple. Here is a good rule. Rube Goldberg makes a point. The best solutions are ALWAYS the simple ones. Yes, I work for a company which makes answers. But let me show you what works. And tell you that you can build this yourself and sell it or use it for the benefit of all. I will show you a good design that takes care of both Power Factor Error and Harmonic distortion.
In this room let us come together. Let us alter our wasteful ways and clean up our secondary power quality headaches. And it begins here at this convention. This is the Power Quality meeting. We are the ones who can educate and change. You are here because you want answers and hope you get them. Ok, let’s look at one approach. And in this room are people who can, will, and must come up with more and better solutions than just this one. Are we agreed?
Here is one thing you can do: (8) This is a notch filter. You have seen this before. First year technical right? But look at this simple circuit in a new way. Maybe you did not think to make a big one instead of something small. What if these capacitors were 100KVARS and the reactor here could handle over 100A. And while we are in the neighborhood, let’s make the reactor a zig-zag transformer to stabilize voltage. What would you do with that?
There is a harmonic trap for a problem frequency with enough capacitive reactance to also offset some of the Power Factor Error. Now make another stage tuned to another harmonic and add to the PFE need. Then put a smart controller in place that reads PFE and brings in stages or takes them out as the Power Factor changes. This way, a bank of capacitors is not on at night when the building is not using power. Power Factor Error is just as bad leading as it is lagging.
Call this drawing one stage then do it again to call it another stage and so forth. Then in your Power Factor correcting, voltage stabilizing, simple harmonic correcting box, (9) put in the right kind of either active or passive harmonic filter to protect your capacitors. What have you got? This is a good answer to a complicated problem. A black box that works! A cheap device that saves your plant, office building, neighborhood or country at least 20% of what used to be pure waste.
No more motor rewinds. No burned up transformers. No more pitted contactors failing. No more capacitors burning out. No more circuits prematurely being destroyed.
Just for a moment let us digress back to that frequency analysis. (10) You know how a microwave oven works don’t you? Sure. An amplifier sends out a special frequency which just happens to be the resonant frequency of water. Only water heats up, not the container unless it is warmed by the hot water. Have you considered the fact that all substances have a resonant frequency like water?
Pick out that frequency and you can selectively heat up anything - right? No problem! Let’s take a look at this spectrum.
Up in this range at about 38 KHz is the resonant frequency for Iron. See that line right there? Throw some of that at a motor, transformer, choke or even the steel enclosure, and you can heat it up even if it is off!! Up here towards the top in the upper range is the resonant frequency for silicone. What is made of silicone? Glass! Diodes! Transistors, IC chips, everything electronic. This little harmonic is overheating all the electronics in your printers, and everything else. And this you will remember is a typical building. No wonder components burn up. They don’t even have to be on. The very power feeding it is slowly eating it away a little bit at a time.
Suddenly that 20% power waste is nothing next to the huge losses to everything that runs our society. Lets do something about it and do it now. (11)
I thank you for a moment of your time.