Liquid cooled drives from ABB

ABB has introduced two new cabinet-built liquid-cooled industrial drives approved for marine applications. They offer a compact and reliable drives solution while achieving the same standard of performance as their air-cooled counterparts. The new drives, the ACS800-17LC and ACS800-37LC, have a power range of 55kW to 5,200kW and are designed for harmonic mitigation and power regeneration.

Mitigating network harmonics is a significant issue in the marine environment. Harmonics can cause losses or disturbances and even premature equipment failure in the different electrical equipment on the network, such as motors, lighting or electronics. Limiting harmonics increases these systems’ reliability and efficiency.

The new ABB industrial drives are designed to mitigate these harmonics, making them suitable for applications such as thrusters, pumps, compressors, winches, cranes or propulsion systems. Using built-in active supply units to eliminate low-order harmonics and line filters to reduce higher-frequency harmonics, the drives provide power with very low total harmonics. This harmonic solution works without requiring additional external filtering equipment or multi-pulse transformers.

The ACS800-37LC is the liquid-cooled variant of ABB’s ACS800 low-harmonic cabinet drive and provides a powerful combination of liquid cooling and harmonic mitigation. The result is a drive featuring an exceptionally low harmonic content in the network of 3 to 5 per cent, which exceeds stringent international harmonic standards like IEEE 519 and G5/4.

The ACS800-17LC regenerates power by feeding braking energy back into the network, eliminating the need for braking choppers and other external braking components. This reduces space requirements and installation complexity while providing energy savings.

The drives have marine type approvals from Det Norske Veritas, ABS and Lloyd’s Register, IP42 protection class as standard and IP54 as option. They come in totally enclosed cabinets with no additional openings for air vents, reducing the effect of dusty and salty air. Additionally, with no large cooling fans and filtering equipment, the operational noise of the drives is significantly reduced.

Both drives use parallel-connected three-phase inverter modules which not only offer operational redundancy but also allow the drive to run at partial load even when one of the modules is not operating.

A first installation of two ACS800-17LC regenerative drives is being done on a Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE) oil and chemical spill abatement vessel. The drives will be used for the main propulsion system and for the ship’s bow thruster. The vessel will be delivered from Finland’s Uudenkaupungin Työvene Oy. OSJ