Power Disturbances and how to protect your facility

APQ is the leader in PQ studies and finding what power disturbance/power anomaly is causing your exact issue. There are hundreds of thousands of different types of power disturbances, each with their own unique characteristics that they leave on the fundamental sine wave. APQ has the knowledge base and specialty engineers to analyze these sine wave distortions to tell you exactly what the event is, and how to properly mitigate the issue the most cost-effective way possible.

APQ is the proud company of two electrical engineers that have titles as CPQs (Certified Power Quality experts). This title is something very exclusive in the power quality realm and certifies that any data provided to you is accurate in its whole, in addition with the engineers sign off this data can hold up in a court of law. There are only 188 CPQs in the world.

An example of what APQ can do to remedy your power disturbances is in reference to the picture at the top of this article.

This is a very basic capture from our PQA (Power Quality Analyzer) that all CPQs will know, first what this is and how to mitigate any issues caused by this event. This power disturbance is known as a capacitor bank ring wave event. The capacitor is on the electric utilities distribution system, when it turns on/off it sends a ring wave on the sinusoidal wave of voltage (as seen above). This is typically a half cycle event.

Two things to watch out for on these events are zero crossing errors, which is when due to the ring wave voltage crosses back over zero crossing when it’s not supposed to.

This can cause a lot of issues with VFDs, PLCs and logic which we explain why and what specific pieces in the circuitry it causes issues with in our electrical engineering power quality training offered through WKU (Western Kentucky University).

The second issue this power disturbance causes is a direct fault on the customer side, as you can see in the sine wave distortion above on current. Both of these issues are very easy fixes but can cause costly mishaps if not properly corrected. 

For more information contact APQ at 813-723-2776.

Check out our strategic partner company ALPHA POWER SYSTEMS