Power Harmonics

"This is awesome Dude!  We only read about problems as bad as this in textbooks!"

Nerds like me.  We find interest and excitement in topics that most people find boring and trivial.

The Power Quality Engineers were from out local utility.  They were sent to help identify and quantify our newly discovered problem with power quality - harmonics.

We first became aware of the mysterious problem after changing out a massive 300hp motor for the third time in a short duration.  Our leader was a bit of a simpleton and relied on shaky resources with topics that he did not understand.

He had burned bridges with one of our motor vendors and was setting fire to our latest vendor.  He was accusing them of poor quality workmanship on the motor rebuild.

Both vendors were long established and reputable shops.  His accusations were based on insufficient knowledge from limited people.  His bull headed approach to our valued vendors caused many related business hardships.  This was one very conspicuous example.

Both vendors had re-examined their entire processes and concluded no wrong doing on their end.  They had recommended that we do the same diligence on our end.  Our leader either didn't understand or acted in malice, until now.

We had data logging equipment recording over the past week and now the engineers were evaluating that data.  The level of harmonics were a magnitude that they had never seen before.  "So cool!"

In layman terms, harmonics are like driving a car on a road full of potholes.  It beats the crap out of your equipment until the insulation fails and you suffer a meltdown. 

No doubt that this was also the reason for our power factor compensation equipment failures.  Both harmonics and power factor were out of whack, but the PF is a whole other story...

Long story short, filters were ordered for our biggest frequency drives.