Sappi reduces losses by installing capacitor banks
Unnecessary energy losses due to reactive power and harmonics
Sappi Maastricht is constantly looking for improvement in business processes. For example, various electrically adjustable drives cause reactive power and harmonic distortion power. These powers are not active / useful power used for the equipment to operate. Therefore, by installing tuned capacitor banks, we increase the efficiency of our installation
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Reactive power with paper production
“Many electrical machines are needed to make paper. The speed-controlled motors of these machines mainly produce 5th harmonic currents. Those currents flow between the transformers, main distributors and machines and do not contribute to the active power. Reactive power disrupts the quality of the installation and causes unnecessary energy losses. After performing Power Quality measurements on various main distributors, it turned out that we have low energy efficiency with several machines and parts of the installation. Based on this data, we have decided to deal with both the reactive power and the distortion capacity.”
Optimizing the energy efficiency
“Based on the measurements and conclusions, we (together with HyTEPS) started looking for the best solution to reduce both the reactive power and harmonic pollution. We decided to go for tuned capacitors banks. With these capacitor banks we compensate the reactive power and the harmonic currents. This increases our installation efficiency (increase in Power Factor) and reduces energy losses to acceptable values. This investment increases the availability of the rotating equipment, which ultimately benefits the production process.”
