Golden route to improved soft starting

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Jul 22, 2004

Users of many types of soft starters can upgrade them to achieve increased functionality at low cost, simply by replacing their existing control cards with Fairford's newly launched Gold Card.

Users of many types of soft starters can upgrade them to achieve increased functionality at low cost, simply by replacing their existing control cards with Fairford's newly launched Gold Card.

The Gold Card is designed to directly replace - without expensive rewiring - the previous generation 3MC and 4MC control cards that were used in Fairford's own soft starters.

The same cards were also used in units supplied to BSL and to major manufacturers including Siemens (3RW10), GEC (F-board), Moeller (MST), Saftronics and Sprecher+Schuh.

"Updating existing equipment to get better performance is far more cost effective in today's competitive market than complete replacement", said David Bennett, MD of Fairford.

"We calculate that there are over 10,000 of our products in the field that can be upgraded to provide increased functionality using the Gold Card".

"We also supplied the 3MC and 4MC cards to many other equipment manufacturers over a 15-year period".

"These units, too, are simple to upgrade as our new card uses the same fixings and the same electrical connections as the unit it is replacing".

The Gold Card provides many features of the latest 5MC card, which is fitted to Fairford's top-of-the range QFE soft starters.

It offers users a host of new features including the facility for a remote keypad for easier setup, energy optimising, auto application setup, adjustable shear pin, adjustable kick start, manual adjustment of start and stop times up to 255s, trip register of last five trips, Modbus communications and many, many more.

With manufacturers everywhere seeking to reduce costs, the ability of the Gold Card to bring energy optimising operation to installations - where previously there was none, is significant.

A soft starter with a Gold Card installed operates conventionally at start-up, soft starting loads and then decoupling the soft starter function in favour of bypass operation.

With conventional soft starters this mode would continue whatever the motor loading.

In contrast, the energy optimising feature built into the Gold Card senses when the motor loading drops to about 50% and brings the soft starter back into circuit, operating in energy optimising mode.

This continues until the load increases again, when the bypass function is reinstated.

"The benefits to industrial sites of being able to save energy on the operation of fixed speed motors should not be underestimated", said Bennett.

"A lot has been written in the press concerning energy saving with variable speed drives, but almost nothing about the use of soft starters to perform the same task".

"This despite the fact that by far the largest numbers of AC induction motors used by UK industry are operated at fixed speeds".

"In view of this, we believe that the opportunity to install some type of optimising operation to reduce costs is one that's too good to miss".