Industrial control for pump systems — Advanced control protections

What’s up everyone. Josh Kingsley here, your host for All Things Control by Eaton.

Minimizing fault damage with advanced pump protection

In this installment of What’s in the Trailer, we will talk about advanced protections that can be applied to pump systems to minimize damage due to faults. We will learn how Eaton’s control products react to problems that might occur and how these features help you deal with them faster. Let’s explore what’s in the trailer.

Detecting and correcting flow loss in a pump system

Reduced flow into centrifugal pumps can cause cavitation, which will significantly damage or destroy your equipment. This usually happens when there is an obstruction in the pipes. 

Now let’s say that somehow one of the pipes in a waste-water treatment plant gets clogged. This could either be because there is debris in the pipe or because someone turned off the control valve. There are two functions that the control products can take to both protect your system and free the pipe of the clog.

The first is that, you can leverage either the PowerXL DG1 variable frequency drive or the Power Xpert C445 intelligent motor management relay to detect the loss of flow and turn off the pump. The decision as to which device to use is driven by application needs.

Both DG1 and the C445 can be setup to monitor the power that the pump is using to operate. When the product detects a loss of power due to a clog in the pipe, either product will fault to protect the pump. These devices will then communicate the fault through the XP 503 HMI, showing exactly where the clog is.

By closing each of the intake valves in the trailer we demonstrate how this feature protects your pumps from the damage that would otherwise occur.

VFD attempts to clear an obstruction

The second feature is specific to the VFD in that it can, not only detect a clog in the system and work to protect the pumps, but it can also attempt to clear the obstruction. The clog system button on the HMI will simulate a rag getting stuck in the pump. This activates the DG1’s derag function and will run the VFD forward and backward to pulverize the obstruction and remove any debris.

Now you can see that the clog is cleared, and the VFD resumes normal function.

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