Bristol Airport heads off VSD problems with replacement programme
Bristol Airport is in the process of replacing aging variable-speed drives in its air-handling units with new units from ABB. Steven Cox, engineering and maintenance manager at the airport explains, ‘Our previous VSDs were 12 years old and were getting to the point where they may be unreliable.’ The AHUs provide heating and cooling to the terminal building.
He further explains, ‘Although we had no problems with breakdowns, to improve reliability we decided to be proactive and replace them with more modern and efficient units.’
There are six AHUs, each with two drives ranging from 15 to 22 kW.
The new drives have fault-finding features and functions that give more control over their operation. Steve Cox says, ‘The load-monitoring function is very useful. If a belt fails, the load will change, causing an alarm to be raised. This is quicker than trying to determine the fault through inspection.’
Two makes of VSD were assessed. The airport’s engineers thought the ABB drive was easier to interact with and to program with logical, user-friendly menus that make for easy navigation and fault finding.
Steve Cox says, ‘It was easy to find the functions we needed without getting lost in sub-menus. When setting up, it was easy to program one drive and then copy the settings across to another drive, simply by moving the plug-in control unit from one drive to another.’
Technical support from ABB included training and hands-on sessions to show engineers what the drives can do.