58 ELECTRIC.IE • The Magazine & Website for the Irish Electrical Industry • Rittal Rising temperatures are a global trend and they will have a major impact on your electrical equipment. Factory oors have always been relatively hostile spaces for all types of electrical equipment including the PLCs and drives responsible for keeping the lines moving. Their components don’t react well to high levels of moisture, dust, and heat in the atmosphere. It’s an uncomfortable fact that as we get closer to summer, our Service teams start seeing a sharp increase in calls about equipment failures and system malfunctions. As temperatures go up, many production teams try to protect their drives by adjusting the system’s climate control units (i.e. increasing the level of cooling) and ironically, this can be the trigger for operations to slow or even stop. If the cooling units are poorly maintained, for example, then the increase in demand can cause them to trip or fail completely, leaving panel temperatures to rise unchecked. Alternatively, if units haven’t been correctly speci ed, or the company has installed new electrical drives without upgrading its cooling system, then lowering the setpoint is not only a risk, it can also be in vain as units are simply not able to deliver the required amount of cooling. So, the cooling equipment fails at precisely the time when the company most needs it. If your cooling system Last year it was reported to be the hottest year on record by the Met Office. Without being alarmist, that is another serious issue that we cannot ignore. Rising temperatures are a global trend and they will have a major impact on your electrical equipment. The Heat is On: How to Prevent Your Electrical Drives Having a Meltdown crashes, your critical automation equipment will shut down to prevent further damage to its components, and without functioning electrical controls, your production lines will grind to a halt. Not only will this have an immediate impact on productivity, but there will also be further substantive costs to get the plant up and running again. However, this type of production line breakdown is almost always entirely preventable. Why Does Electrical Equipment Need Cooling? All electrical equipment generates heat as a by-product of its activities, and this heat needs to be removed. For every increase of 10oC in your panel temperature, it’s estimated that the life of your expensive equipment, including PLCs, and variable speed drives, is halved. The cost of replacing equipment that has failed due to overheating can be substantial. Large drives can cost more than £10,000, meaning the annual bill across even a small site can be many times this gure – although, arguably, the availability of replacement parts is of more concern currently than their cost. With shortages in global supply chains causing the lead-times for some electronic equipment to be more than a year, businesses are having to nd alternative solutions to get their lines back up and running, but not without delay. Any lost output caused by a hiatus in the processes that the equipment controls, will continue for as long as it takes to repair the fault, and this may have huge, wide-reaching, and expensive consequences for a business. Moreover, maintaining a stable temperature within an enclosure through effective climate control has another bene t. It ensures that your electrical drives will work to their full speed and potential, so that the production equipment that they control continues to operate at a high tempo. Again, this can have a major impact on productivity and turnover; the faster a pallet-wrapping machine works, for example, the more goods can be shipped. How to Check if Cooling Equipment is Failing? Of course, any system can fail without warning, however, it’s more likely that you will experience certain warning signs beforehand, which indicate that your cooling equipment is starting to struggle. As a guide, if you’ve encountered one or more of the following, then something may be amiss and should be investigated before bigger problems surface.
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