16.07.2019 • Baden-Württemberg has awarded Power and Energy Solutions first prize in the "Energy efficiency" category of the Environmental Technology awards at a special ceremony. This intelligent power and energy management system for industrial drives makes it possible to recover energy for swift, short-term intermediate storage in capacitors.
It provides the system's stored energy again without interruption and allows for safe shutdown in case of a power outage – significantly reducing spikes in the power drawn from the grid. Power and Energy Solutions help increase system availability, cut energy consumption and costs, and reduce the strain on electrical hardware.
Power and Energy Solutions are particularly useful in machinery and systems that often accelerate or decelerate heavily, losing energy through braking and causing extreme spikes in power consumption with the loads applied during startup. The new power and energy management system evens things out by temporarily storing the braking energy generated by machinery or systems and making it available again as required. The process ensures a constant energy flow and reduces energy spikes in the grid supply. Systems can then be designed according to their average power rather than their peak values, as in the past. This means a system's electrics can be designed to be more compact, lightweight and resource-efficient, both in the control cabinet and their connection to the grid.
"Depending on the system in which Power and Energy Solutions are used, energy costs can be reduced by up to 35 percent – and even more in certain cases. By reducing power spikes, this solution dramatically relieves the supply systems and thus creates vital supply reliability in the course of the energy revolution. At the same time, it increases system availability, ensuring that if the current supply is interrupted, the system can be shut down and the tools protected – without any need for a separate UPS component," explains Dr. Hans Krattenmacher, Managing Director Innovation Mechanics.
There is a wide range of potential application scenarios for the new Power and Energy Solutions, ranging from areas in automotive production to filling and packaging systems in the food and beverage sector or luggage conveyors in airports, not to mention all kinds of transportation and logistics applications.