While I was at our corporate office last week for four days worth of meetings, I talked with Packaging World Editor Pat Reynolds about green automation and energy efficiency.
He and I will be running some complementary articles on the subject (he in Sept and me in Nov). He showed me a story from Bosch Rexroth about using a regeneration function in drives to put power back on the grid. Essentially, if you have certain applications such as a centrifuge or elevator, the mechanical reversing function can cause the motor to turn into a generator and excess power is genertated. The old response was to put on extra “braking resistors” to burn up the power so that the drive system didn’t burn up. Newer electronics allows the generated electricity to go back on the power grid, power local 24 vdc equipment or otherwise use the power.
This week, I received another press release, this time from B&R Automation about the energy savings that can be gleaned from its motion control line of products. The ACOPOS series of motion uses power supplies that employ power factor correction, another energy wasting power function. The release states that the series also employs regeration.
Look for more green automation releases–in some cases not new products–that emphasize energy savings in the face of increasing costs.
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