Electric Motors Archives - Page 2 of 6 - Decatur Industrial Electric

Decatur Industrial Electric Strategic Vendor Partnership with Siemens Continues with ABB

ABB has completed its acquisition of the Siemens low voltage NEMA motor business. Decatur Industrial Electric is a top national distributor for Siemens motors and looks forward to continued success with ABB, who has also been a valued vendor partner for many years.

“ABB is a leader in the industry,” said Trent Thompson, President of Decatur Industrial Electric. “We look forward to continue working with ABB and providing our customers the same great motor and service they have come to expect.”

The line of horizontal and vertical induction severe duty and general purpose motors will be re-branded as ABB and reintroduced to the marketplace. In addition, ABB manufactures, designs, and markets the product brands of Baldor-Reliance motors.

The High Cost of Reactive Maintenance

With proactive maintenance, sometimes time and money have to be spent to save more money and time in the long run. We have all been there, taking time and budgeting is hard sometimes. However, if you’re relying on reactive maintenance every time, your assets will sustain much more severe damage than they would have with a predictive maintenance schedule.

This situation we are highlighting here is all too familiar. We know many of you recognize it! This concrete customer used to pull this particular motor annually for inspection due to its extremely harsh environment, but it had been over two years now since it was last proactively pulled.

The motor came in covered in debris (concrete). Due to the thickness of the debris, the motor was unable to “breathe” and overheated. Experts agree that excessive heat causes rapid deterioration of motor winding insulation. The common rule states that insulation life is cut in half for every 10 C of additional heat to the windings above rating.

Predictive maintenance helps you perform maintenance when it’s essential for the asset’s health and when it’s most cost-effective.

ANSI/EASA Standard AR100

A commonly used and well-respected standard in the electric motor testing industry is the Recommended Practice for the Repair of Rotating Electrical Apparatus (AR100). Furthermore, this standard is provided by the very respected Electric Apparatus Services Association (EASA). It was first approved in 1998 and has since been revised four times with the most recent revision in 2020. For those of you who regularly read the PdMA Tips you might remember we provided an update in 2021. We focused on two important topics including the revised minimum insulation resistance for DC armatures to 5Mohm instead of 100Mohm, and the addition of a new resistance unbalance limit of 1% for form wound and 2% for random wound motors. With no additional changes since the 2020 revision these two items are still the biggest changes to impact the electric motor testing industry. However, another section worth reading and understanding is from section 4.4.1.1 New Windings. “Immediately after rewind, when a high-potential test of the winding is required, it is recommended that the test voltage not exceed 80% of the original test voltage.” This could be an important guideline for your quality assurance team when reviewing your motor repair/rewind procedures.

For a full copy of the ANSI/EASA Standard AR100-2020 visit the EASA website at https://easa.com/resources/resource-library/ansieasa-standard-ar100-2020-recommended-practice-for-the-repair-of-rotating-electrical-apparatus

Source: PdMA and EASA

Fault Zone Series: Part 1 Power Quality

Sticking to the Fault Zone approach to electric motor troubleshooting we are starting this series with Power Quality. “You are what you eat,” is what you were told as a child when your parents were trying to get you to eat healthy foods. Well, the same is true for your electric motor. The motor’s health is based in part on whether you feed it good clean power quality. Many electric motor fault zones are related to heat and Power Quality is no different. Poor power quality makes a motor work harder than designed to deliver the horsepower required by the load. A 100HP motor with poor power quality may require 110HP worth of current to deliver the requested 100HP. This extra current increases the heating of a motor beyond its design temperature and will reduce the life of the motor. Identifying power quality issues like excessive harmonics and voltage imbalances early will allow you to reduce the load of a motor when possible until you can correct the issues and extend the life of your motor. For more examples of Power Quality anomalies and Power Quality standards applied to your electric motor reliability visit MCEMAX Fault Zone- Power Quality on the PdMA YouTube Channel.

New Year Motor Reliability Tip

It’s the beginning of a new year and time to remind ourselves of the need for an annual review of our alarm setpoints. We should annually review the setpoints to make sure they are not too conservative resulting in nuisance alarms, or too liberal resulting in missed indications leading to unexpected failures. Electric motor windings and insulation technology does change so it is critical to check in with your equipment vendors during this review to identify any default setpoint changes they recommend and to learn of any new tests or alarms that have been added through software updates. Be careful not to allow a more conservative setpoint established by your equipment vendor to overwrite a local setpoint developed from experience with onsite analytics and historical knowledge. Pay close attention to any application or system changes that would demand a new baseline for alarm setpoint establishment and learning.

Many alarms are based on a comparison to baseline so once the baseline is completed it is important to establish these alarm setpoints. Although your equipment vendors should be keeping you abreast of industry standard changes, it is a good idea to check in with the high profile standards for any changes affecting your industry. For the electrical reliability industry IEEE, EASA, and NEMA are examples of high profile industry standards that your electrical reliability team should be aware of.