Schneider Electric launches first intelligent drives family

It is designed to help factory owners, plant managers and engineers better manage their processes, to ensure they are performing as efficiently as possible.

The Altivar Process family of drives adds digital intelligence to even the smallest of field devices. This enables users to make fully informed decisions about their entire plant, from the top down, in order to increase flexibility, reduce downtime by identifying faults, speed up processes; and ultimately reduce a plant’s carbon footprint.

Previously, there was little focus from the plant managers to monitor the efficiency of their devices, such as pumps and determine whether each pump is operating at its best efficiency point (BEP).  The performance of an operating pump is affected when it operates away from its 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.  In the case of a pump, 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 the BEP.

This enables users to make informed decisions about when to carry out certain processes and for how long, reducing valuable energy costs; and also saving a further 8 per cent on total lifecycle 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.

The Altivar Process will be available to buy from July this year.