October 2017
Double the life span of your variable speed drives for less per day than the cost of a cup of coffee
T
he idea that living things shut down instead of wearing down has received substantial support in recent years. Researchers working on the now famous worm C.elegans (the little nematode worm behind research that led scientists to receive the Nobel Prize, not just once but twice, in a decade) were able to produce worms that live more than twice as long and age more slowly, simply by altering a single gene. Scientists have since come up with single gene alterations that increase the life spans of fruit flies, mice and yeast – and Quantum Controls have come up with a solution that will double the life span of your variable speed drives.
A little bit of history The majority of evidence goes against the idea that our life spans are programmed into us. For most of our 100,000 year existence excluding the last couple of hundred years - the average human life span has been 30 years or less. Research shows that subjects of the Roman Empire had a life expectancy of 28 years. The natural course was to die before old age. Indeed, for most of history, death was a risk at every stage of life and had no obvious connection with ageing at all. As Montaigne wrote, in the late 16th century: “to die of old age is a death rare, extraordinary and singular, and therefore so much less natural than the others: it is the last and most extreme sort of dying”. So today, with our average life span in much of the world climbing past 80 years, we are already oddities living well beyond our appointed time. When we study ageing, what we are trying to understand is not so much a natural process as an unnatural one. Leonid Gavrilov, a researcher at the University of Chicago, USA, argues that human beings fail the way all complex systems fail: randomly and gradually.
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Getting back to equipment As us engineers have long recognised, simple devices typically do not age. They function reliably until a critical component fails, and the whole thing dies in an instant. A variable speed drive for instance, works smoothly until the capacitors start discharging dielectric or IGBT devices fail, and then it does not work at all. But complex systems - such as your manufacturing process - have to survive and function despite having many key critical components such as motors and drives. That’s why engineers design machines and production processes with multiple layers of redundancy: with backup systems, and backup systems for the backup systems. These may not be as efficient as the first line components, but they can allow the machine and process to keep running even when damage accumulates.
in modern medicine. We can do the same to prolong the life of drives and motors with regular maintenance carried out by expert engineers according to the manufacturer’s recommendations, and by adopting all that ‘industry 4.0’ now has to offer. The smart monitoring technology available today can go a long way in preventing and pre-empting equipment failure. While this somewhat eradicates the element of surprise, there is still a need to have a plan in place for when equipment sensors and monitoring devices flag the risk of failure. So what if we told you that if you have a problem of any kind with any of your installed variable speed drives, Quantum’s expert engineers are just a phone call away and can GUARANTEE a first visit fix? Let us introduce you to The ONE CALL Contract from Quantum which guarantees: • 24/7 direct telephone access to our drive experts • Immediate ‘engineer to site’ request • Our unique ‘First Site Visit Fix’ guarantee
Unless process equipment is correctly maintained, the defects in your process equipment increase until the time comes when just one more defect is enough to stop your whole process. With the average cost of one hour of lost production due to drive failure in UK manufacturing being £12,000, this condition known as frailty must be avoided, and it sits with engineers like ourselves to prevent this occurring.
Coming full circle It happens to motors, variable speed drives, softstarts and it happens to us - eventually too many joints are damaged or one too many arteries calcify. There are no backups. We wear down until we can’t wear down anymore. But we can avoid and slow the inevitable by leading healthy lifestyles and with advancements
• All variable speed drives installed on your site covered under one contract regardless of make, type and power rating • Access to UK’s largest stock of variable speed drives, spares and hire units • Unlimited calls and site visits And the best bit? You can have all of this for just £947 net per 12 month contract – and to save you doing the maths, that’s only £2.59 per day! For more information about how our ONE CALL Contract can help you eradicate premature failures on your plant, visit www.quantum-onecall.co.uk, email onecall@quantum-controls.co.uk or call our team on 0330 057 3788. Join the other 200+ UK companies that have a 12 month support and maintenance call out contract with Quantum for less per day than the cost of a cup of coffee!