Miller Magazine Issue: 119 November 2019

56 MILLER / NOVEMBER 2019 In any industrial facility, the energy costs are a major issue. We have large motors, and we have a lot of them. Left unchecked, they can cause major problems in your company. POWER FACTOR CORRECTION Electrical power has two components. One is called active (or “true”), and it is the one you actually consume, as work performed or heat lost. The other one is called reactive, and it is just moved around, like waves in a lake. Both of them, summed in a vector, make the “apparent power”. Electrical motors are basically big rotat- ing magnets, so they use a lot of reactive power. This is not bad or good per se, but for the electri- cal power companies, having too much reactive power means having to use larger components everywhere, just to accommodate something that nobody pays for. You can control this by adding capacitors in your facility, either next Having to start and stop equipment manually means having longer times when you grain isn’t processed. You start the motors in an operation, from last to first, and you have to make sure the equipment is running in regime (in normal stable operation) before starting the next one. If you do it by instinct, you will naturally wait a little more than required, just because of the fear of getting a clog in the system and have your boss screaming at you. An automatic system can be calibrated to wait just the minimum, thus saving valuable time that would be otherwise wasted running machines empty. Save your energy Prof. Gustavo Sosa Industrial Mechanical Engineer Licensed Grain Inspector MBA Project Management SOSA – Engineering Consultants ing.gustavo.sosa@gmail.com