Pharma Focusing on Power Quality Reduces Downtime

Tablet manufacturing line

Pharmaceuticals are driven by innovation and efficiency. Sensitive loads in the process are highly susceptible to power quality issues.

Challenges our Customers Experience before engaging Omniverter

Power Quality investigation at a pharma process line
Pharma FDA and quality control

Pharma processes use variable frequency drives and electronic controls to ensure product quality. Cleanroom control and compressor drives are sensitive to voltage sags.

These are some common challenges you will encounter in your pharmaceutical plant when you have power quality issues:

  • Malfunction of temperature control in processes.
  • Compressor line stoppages cause loss of positive air pressure.
  • Unscheduled stoppages during production.
  • PLC malfunction and electronic card failures.
  • Risk in material wastage during power failures.
  • Subject to FDA regulations.

Common Power Quality Issues Causing these Problems

Voltage Sag

Voltage Sag/Dips

Voltage sags are the primary cause of unplanned production stoppages in industry. Causes include electrical network faults due to weather, animals across terminals, traffic accidents, load switching upstream, startup of large loads or transformer energization.

Voltage Transiets

Voltage Transients

A sudden change from the nominal voltage or current may be caused by faults in the network, switching of large loads, load shedding, or switching of capacitor banks upstream in the utility network. Voltage surges also occur but may be less severe.

Power Interruption

Momentary Power Interruptions

Momentary power loss is complete loss of voltage on one or more phase conductors between 0.5 cycles and 3 seconds.  The most common forms of power failure are due to utility protection systems, e.g. recloser operations, switching, breaker tripping and equipment failures.

Harmonic Distortion

Current & Voltage Harmonic Distortion

The use of non-linear loads is the main cause of harmonic distortion. The injection of harmonic currents results in voltage distortion which may cause electronic equipment failure, increased heat in drives and transformers, unwanted tripping, malfunction of sensitive equipment and controls and failure of imaging and scanning equipment.

Possible Solutions to your Power Quality Problems

The Omniverter approach is to understand your particular issue via data analysis prior to offering a product solution. The learn more about our solutions we use individually or in combinnation follow the link below.

Product Solutions
Benefits from Solving these Power Quality Issues

Benefits derived from Omniverter solutions:

  • Uninterrupted stable power and voltage sag correction.
  • Protection of unexpected production stoppages due to momentary interruptions or voltage sag conditions.
  • Production uptime and improvement in product quality.
  • Extended lifetime of electrical equipment.
  • Improved the compliance with power quality, and FDA rules.
  • Achieve goals of lower costs, greater flexibility, and higher throughput.

Technical Details
    Accurate data requires the use of dedicated power quality analyzers. Assessment of the data allows us to identify specific problems and only then do we offer a solution.

Summary of the Power Quality Issues (Based on IEEE 1159:2019)
AVC Technical Paper
AVCRTS Technical Paper
Solar & Wind Technical Paper
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