The VFD Without the Trade-Off

I’m Amy Hodd, editor in chief of Cumpston Systems Media. Welcome to the VFD was never the problem. A cleaner Filterless path to motor control and water and wastewater sponsored by Smart Technologies. Our presenters today are Simon Leblond and Josh Sinanan. Simon is the CEO and co-founder of Smart Technologies, and Josh is the national sales director for West Central Canada and West USA for Smart Technologies. At this time, it is our pleasure to begin the webinar. Stay tuned after the presentation for the Q&A session, and we’ll get to as many of them as possible. Now I’ll turn it over to Simon to begin the presentation. Thank you, Amy, and welcome to this webinar.

We’re going to talk about a different type of VFD and also a lot about the motor and how the impacts of Vfds on motor. So before we jump into our agenda. Uh, let me introduce myself. Uh, I’m the CEO and co-founder of Smart Technologies. We’ve been at this for over eight years. Um, and I’m lucky to have Josh with me as well. Uh, who’s going to help me, uh, shoulder some of these, uh, tougher questions that might come our way and, uh, keep me on track. Josh, can you introduce yourself? Uh, a little bit? Sure. Absolutely. Uh, my name is Josh. Sorry. Josh. Synonym. Uh, sorry for the photo there. That’s not Kim Jong un. That’s me. And, uh, I’ve been in, uh, motors and drives since, uh, ninety seven now with various distributors and manufacturers.

And it is absolutely my honor to be with smart, uh, for the last little bit here and, uh, great technology, amazing innovation. So looking forward to discussing the product with you guys. Excellent. So let’s get right into it. The agenda for today is pretty straightforward. Um, we’re going to talk about, uh, really what causes, uh, motor failure, uh, and what that means. Um, we’ll then talk about, uh, what is different with the clean power drive, a few examples of live deployments. Then what does the install cost mean and what does it mean for you? And then we’ll finish with the Q amp A. So maybe we can start. Uh oh. And at the end we do have an offer for live attendees.

So do stay till the end. So if we take a step back, really, uh, historically there’s been two options to control motor. Uh, you either run a VFD to have your full motor control and live with the filters, the harmonics and the motor wear and tear. Or you stay with a contactor across a line and you get clean power, but no control. But this is the historical trade off. And you know, if we really look at those, um, the contactor, uh, you get full speed of your motor, but it’s super robust and it is very simple. Stick the contactor on off. Um, and then the VFD gives you, uh, really the full motor motor control. And that came up in the nineteen eighties.

Um, and that’s been seeing a lot of growth because vfds have real important advantage. So the first one, and probably the reason behind most of the growth, uh, in the industry is the affinity law and how that brings a humongous energy savings. So the capability to adjust the motor speed and bringing with it those energy savings has been driving a lot of it. Of course, there’s a lot of places. Um, you know, namely in water, wastewater, maybe if you want to have a constant pressure where it’s the process itself that’s driving the adoption of the VFD. And finally, the last reason is when I talked about the contactor, one of the things that, you know, you get that inrush start.

So both electrically and mechanically, uh, you’re impacting your system. So really a lot of reasons to adopt vfds. And, uh, we’re seeing that, uh, in numbers and the growth of the market. But what is less discussed is what comes with the PhD’s, those disadvantages that are around. And that is both on the grid side and on the motor side. So, um, you know, on the grid side, you’ve got that diode bridge rectifier that is creating electrical pollution. So harmonics and that goes back into the grid. And so typical VFD will bring twenty five to forty percent harmonics with it. And on the motor side you’ve got that fast switching to create that or that’s called pulse width modulation or p.w.m.

And those square wave going to the motor um are. Wearing off the motor. And this is really going to be the focus of a lot of what we discussed today with, uh, and to protect against both the harmonics and the pu pu. There’s a whole ecosystem that’s been built around that. So you’ve got, um, filter manufacturers and, uh, shaft grounding ring manufacturers, all of these band aids that have been put to mitigate the BFD, uh, impacts and most importantly, is the impact on the motors. And so when we started smart D, um, we were hearing these stories and. We had to dig pretty deep to understand the impact on the motor. And that is, uh, studied and documented in scientific literature, but you can actually find it.

And it’s documented how. DFDS actually have an impact on the motor life of your motor. So motor is designed for fifteen plus years, but then your motor dies early and you’re not totally sure why. Uh, and quite a lot of that gap can be explained actually by the vfds. Um, and their impact. So where are those missing months and those missing years and what is causing them? So there are mainly three impacts to, um, uh, that are impacting the motor life through VFD that is insulation, aging, bearing current and harmonic heating. So let’s deep dive into each of these to better understand them. To me if. We look at the installation aging.

This is caused mainly by the, um, uh, square voltage signal coming from the VFD. And so we’ve talked about pulse width modulation, which is the mechanism by which a VFD generates a pseudo sine wave that it can then control, with which it controls the speed of the motor. Each one of these pulses in the p.w.m. Has a rising edge, and they steep edge actually will come and attack multiple times per second. The installation of the motor. So um, as you repeat that. You’re getting um an attack on the insulation of both your motor and your cables. And the longer also your cables are, the more you have a phenomenon called reflected wave that increases that peak voltage even further.

And so that’s why you’re going to see more filters the longer cable, because you’re trying to attenuate that impact of them. Josh, was there something you wanted to say? Okay. Um. So as we have long cable and we get overvoltage, this is where you’re going to have premature death. Uh, you’re going to have corona discharge. Uh, that will erode the widening and the cable installations. And so that’s your, uh, first impact installation, uh, aging. Second one is bearing current. Bearing current can also be source with the poo poo. So if you have three balanced sine wave as you’d have with a contactor, um, the sum of these three sine wave is zero.

And so you don’t have a residual voltage. But in the case of p.w.m you have these pulses and the sum of these three pulses is never zero. And so this is the, uh what we call um common mode voltage. That’s the non-zero sum of these three pulses. That common mode voltage then gets, uh, thrown into the motor, uh, creating, um, shaft voltage and inducing current into the um motor that induces then, uh, bearing current. And so these high, these discharges and your bearing is what will be causing pitting and flooding of those bearing in early failure. So that is actually, you know, the bearing failure is the imminent, uh, reason for bearing failures and motor failures caused by vfds.

But then there’s the last one, which is harmonic heating. Um, and I know this presentation is more focused on the motor side. Um, and when we talk about harmonic, we typically talk about harmonic on the grid. And you know, as I mentioned early on, a VFD will generate twenty five to forty percent of harmonics on the grid. But there are also generating harmonics on the motor side. The phenomenon is not exactly the same. Um, while on the grid. It’s the diode bridge rectifier on the motor side. It’s the high speed switching that is causing the harmonics. The impact of the harmonic is the same. I mean, fundamentally harmonic is energy that can’t be used and that needs to be dissipated.

This gets dissipated as heat sound vibration. Um, and it’s the same whether you’re on the grid or the motor. And so the harmonics you’re generating and sending to your motor need to be dissipated as heat. And so if we measure this, um, we can measure that there’s about a ten percent difference in temperature between a standard six volt drive and a um in this case our drive, but would be true also with contactor. So I’m going to a conclusion a little early on this slide. But fundamentally, as you keep further your motor, you’re decreasing its lifetime. So it’s about a rule of. For every ten degrees C, you increase the motor temperature, you’re.

You’re having the life of that motor. So six or seven degrees in what we’ve measured is quite significant and has an impact on the fast aging of the insulation. Throughout me. So as you get a motor that fails early, it’s of course, the cost of replacing that motor and sending it to the repair shop, but it’s also not knowing. And so it’s the emergency call out where you need last minute change. It’s losing the actual capacity this motor is working on, um, and making sure that you’re compliant, uh, with everything you’re doing. So the longer your motor and the more reliable your motor less exposed you guys are. Yeah. And this is really where we come in.

Uh, when we started smart D, our goal really was to change the motor control industry, to get to a place where we keep the benefits of vfds, but remove the disadvantage. And really, we’ve been working at it for, as I mentioned over eight years, we’re backed by a number of, uh, large investors, both strategic and, uh, capital intensive. We’ve been developing the Clean Power VFD, uh, for all of those years with really the goal to have low harmonic and no external filters whatsoever. Um, and it’s a product that has been selling for a number of years that is certified to, uh, the specs you expect. What does that mean in practice?

It means sine wave n and sine wave out. So, um, we’ve seen what the p w looks like. Uh, well we don’t have that. So we have, uh, whether you’re looking at a voltage or current, you have a really low harmonic on the grid. So those sine wave and on the motor side, you don’t even have that PWM square signal. You have sine wave in both voltage and current. And so that means in practice that all of these band aids, all of these mitigation that we’ve, um, we’ve been building in the industry suddenly go way on harmonic, uh, natively in the drive. And so you don’t need a passive or active harmonic filter or a line choke on the motor side.

So as I said, you’re removing the PWM output. So all of the phenomenons we’ve just seen are not there. You don’t have the voltage spikes. You don’t have the common modes of voltage. Um, and you’re not overheating your motor. So no common mode chokes no. Um, uh, load side choke or DVD filter or sine wave filter and no, uh, shaft grounding ring or insulated, uh, bearings required. So, um, you’re capable really here of retrofitting a drive, uh, natively. And the last part, not the topic of today’s presentation, but, um, you know, braking resistors, if you’re regening to the grid is also something we cover because our drive is a four quadrant drive.

So really simplifying that panel, simplifying the install. Uh, all because everything is embedded in a single drive. We’re not going to go in a detailed walkthrough of the technology behind that. We’re actually happy to, uh, give you a one on one presentation if you want, or you can, uh, watch some older webinar in which we did, but let’s, uh, mention simply that we combine a few technologies to bring all of that filtering in a miniaturized way into the drive. And really fundamentally what we have is we’re combining, uh, silicon carbide MOSFETs instead of igBT. Silicon carbide MosFET are a new new material at this point when we started was new, but it’s there and it’s pretty much in every EV out there, so I wouldn’t call it new anymore.

But it’s a newer material that enables really fast switching with much lower losses. And so we’re using that, um, and we’re switching them faster. We’re combining that with a multi-level architecture. So both on the active front end on the grid side and on the inverter side for the motor. Um, and finally, we’re combining some patented algorithms in there. All of that together comes and enables us to miniaturize the filter by a factor of two hundred and have them on board the drive. So we are a filter less drive from the user’s perspective. In practice, we do have some miniaturized filters directly in the drive to filter out all of the electrical pollution.

With that being said, you get still the benefits of the drive, so you get all of the energy savings and more because the losses that you typically have in those filters are now the losses of the drive is the loss of the system. You know, harmonics, uh, caused losses, as I mentioned in, um, your transformers and your motor. All of these go away. So you get the, the energy savings, you get the full control, uh, without the external complexity. And most importantly is the drive preserves the lifetime expectancy of the motor. So everything we discuss goes away because you’re really back to, um, where you were with the contactor.

Um, you’re, uh, removing the insulation aging because what the motor see is a pure sine wave. So no more, uh, voltage spikes that are attacking that insulation. You’re not generating bearing current, uh, in the same way. Uh, can’t say we eliminate one hundred percent, but we eliminate ninety five percent of it. And even if you go and measure at the shaft voltage, you’ll see that voltage itself is never high enough to create that, um, those arcs. So, um, in, in essence, we’re coming back to what the bearings are rated for. And then, uh, you know, we all of these things we’ve measured and have both field and lab data. Um, and then harmonic, uh, heating, uh, we can see it and we’ll see it also in a few minutes.

In some case studies, you can also hear it that you’re not having that harmonic going into the motor. So really at the end of the day, you’re back to the fifteen year design life where the drive is preserving that design life instead of reducing it. And reason is very simple. Motor is seeing, uh, the mains again. Um, and so, um, it’s not just that we’re another drive, we’re a drive that enables the motor to live up to its motor, uh, nameplate again. Well, let’s dive in a few case studies where we can, uh, see what I describe in practice. Um, if we start with bearings. Uh, so, uh, we deployed these drive at energy where, um, they were having recurring bearing issues.

Um, it’s a probably. And Josh, you’ve lived some of that too. Um, customers who have these recurring bearing issues actually seek us out very often. They’ve tried everything, you know, they’ve put a load site filter, they’ve put the shaft grounding rings. Um, this was the case with inertia. And now they had a, uh, service, uh, shop come in every four months and do these vibration analysis. And yet they were having these bearing failures every twelve months, you know, definitely not the life expectancy of those bearings. And then they came to us, um, and, uh, they deployed a drive, got the before and after from that, uh, service shop on that, uh, vibration analysis.

And you can see the results on the screen. So nearly ninety five percent reduction in vibration acceleration. Nearly ninety percent and reduction in spike energy. Most importantly, in the past two years, they’ve not had that phenomena of early bearing failures anymore. Um, and they’ve started installing us on more and more drives. Um. You know, if we talk about, uh, heating, uh, in this case, uh, we were able to measure the sound level between our drive and another drive right side. And so you’re seeing about fifteen decibels difference in noise level between the two, uh, coming from the harmonic, uh, sent into the motor, uh, maintaining, uh, t h d I below five percent and getting the energy savings they were seeking by doing a retrofit.

I’ve also run into if I could just interject for a little bit. Absolutely. Josh. Yeah. You bet. Um, sorry to steal your thunder, but, um, there’s been like when you talk about burying discharge and burying fluting and pitting, uh, from the Commonwealth voltage situation, uh, there’s been a lot of variation. It used to be that people only cared about larger horsepowers, larger frames. Um, but now with the fan walls and with, uh, some of the magnetics involved, the way people are laying out their cable tray and whatnot. Um, I run into some situations where even on smaller drives, smaller motors, uh, we’re talking like fifteen horsepower, that kind of thing.

Um, there’s so much induced common mode voltage happening through capacitive coupling and the way they’re putting their cables down and whatnot. Um, that it is, it doesn’t matter what kind of filter they’re putting out there. Right? So we’ve run into that before and, um, and of course the solution was getting some isolation up front. This is before smart D came on the market. So they would put in isolation transformers to help with common mode, not just the common mode filters. And it was a real nightmare for a lot of these guys. So we were able to help a customer before smart D before before the technology even existed.

So we were, we helped a customer, uh, quit replacing their motors every four to six months to replacing them every seven months to nine months. And I thought that was awesome. Yeah. So things like that are quite common for the, for us to find capacitive coupling problems that amplify the very issue. Yep. Um, and, uh, finally, the, um, if we’re talking about, uh, voltage spike, uh, love, uh, the city of Stratford, uh, case study, Um in this case, um, kind of a proof by, uh, by retrofit where um fourteen hundred feet of, uh, old cable with the duty submersible pump, uh, where they had tried to install other drives that trip and they had to remove them.

Um, and in our case, they install us on the wall and no cabinet, no filters. Um, and just plug this in and we’ve been, uh, running there for a year and a half, no problem. Um, and got the again, got the energy saving they were seeking by installing us, got the control also we got integrated in this case, uh, with their PLC. So they had the, uh, iOS and Modbus TCP, uh, working with us. So you get really the full control in this case, but with a super straightforward retrofit and no voltage spike, no reflected wave that you’d get with any other drive with these types of cable length. I do have another quick example on that too that I wanted to throw in.

There’s also applications where you’ve got multiple motors on one VFD. And so we’ve had that experience where you add up all those lead lengths for all the multiple motors, and it exceeds what a normal traditional drive would allow you to, uh, to install. And again, a lot of those guys are installing those cables right alongside each other in, let’s say, PVC, uh, protective conduit, things like that, underground to another area. And you can’t really ground the, the, uh, the conduit itself. So, um, when you have an output that’s a pure sine wave, which we do, um, Everything goes back to acting as if it’s on the grid. And so now you can go back to your normal practices for cable and satellite installation and how you strategize for those lengths.

And no need for a filter. So just wanted to throw that there as well. Well, you’re setting me up really well for the next, uh, case study, which I actually forgot we had in the slide deck. Um, and the ag industry. Um, and it’s actually in the ag industry where we’re seeing a lot of people using us with multiple, uh, motors. Uh, and those cable length really add up. Um, and of course, uh, uh, voltage spike is the same thing because you add all of these independent motor lengths for the total value. Uh, but in the ag industry, it’s also the voltage. So the fact that we remove that straight voltage and don’t impact the animals is also a reason why we’re seeked out a little bit left field versus the motor, but definitely a relevant there.

Um, so at the end of the day, you know, now you have these three options. Um, you have the contactor. That’s simple. Um, and you have the VFD, uh, that is initially just the VFD, but then comes with a harmonic mitigation study and then a output filter, whether it’s a choke, a DVD or a sine wave, um, line reactor or maybe more, uh, harmonic mitigation. If it’s a mandated, um, you need to oversize everything around it. Um, and you potentially need to replace your motor earlier because of these failures, uh, cables and, you know, VFD rated cables. And then what was a simple drive becomes an engineering project and suddenly you’ve got a consulting engineer, um, working on this to specify everything.

So, um, I actually had a spec engineer who said, you know, I love drives. I don’t like what comes around them. And that’s what gets you a five thousand drive becomes a twenty thousand dollars project. Um, and now, yeah, you have a third, um, avenue, which is the Clean power VFD where the drive is the cabinet. Um, and you don’t need those external filters. Um, the install is simple. You don’t need everything specified. Uh, think about it as I have my cabinet and my drive. And so it’s a pretty simple, uh, retrofit, um, for you. Uh, what does it mean? It means, uh, operations that don’t get as much interruption from a motor failure and added reliability, less bearing changes and so on.

And, you know, less specifying engineer work where you know you’re going to be compliant, triple eight, five nineteen for the harmonic side. Uh, and you don’t need to worry about what’s going to happen with my, um, motor and my cables. If we just run you quickly through our spec. Um, so we have drives for four, four, eighty volt and six hundred. Uh, so we love all of North America. Um, we, uh, support, uh, fifteen horsepower to, uh, seventy five horsepower today. Our drives are UL certified. Uh, we will typically see three percent harmonic, uh, uh, performance, uh, and we guarantee you less than five percent. Uh, we’re happy if you reach out to us.

We can give you some specs exactly on how we behave with different grip types. Uh, you don’t always find that in other low harmonic offers of. Happy to share that with you guys. Um, we have a unity power factor. Um, above sixty five percent load. Uh, we’ll still have a higher power factor than a standard drive even under a sixty five percent load. But if you really want unity power factor, that’s where we perform. Um, we have a fantastic mobile app. If you, uh, type clean power in the app store or the Google Play store, you can download it, play with it offline. It’s available for free. So I encourage you to download it now and start playing with it.

You can commission offline. And then once you’ve bought your smart drive you can download that. And you know, as we highlighted quite a few times, uh, it’s a drive that actually doesn’t, uh, wear down the motor lifetime as other standard drives. Um, so, you know, to kick off the Q&A, um, I’d asked the audience, you know, uh, what type of harmonic mitigation do you specify today? Uh, do you use any and if so, what type? And, you know, do you have a motor or pump that keeps you up at night? And so, um, think about it. Um, we’ve, uh, and, you know, uh, Josh, you talked about, uh, capacitance. Sometimes you’re adding filter and you’re actually making a problem worse with your motor.

So there’s a, there’s also a complexity there where the system starts having its own life. The more you’re adding boxes, you’re adding to it. Um, so, um, we’re gonna be taking questions. Uh, one thing I want to throw out to the audience before we go into the Q&A is we do have an offer for the audience. Um, is that if you have a retrofit, so if you have a motor or pump on a contactor or a soft start, uh, come to us and we will, uh, offer you a retrofit to, uh, and gives you a guaranteed ROI in one year or we’ll pay the difference. So, uh, definitely reach out to us so that we can review, send us the motor nameplate, send us the details.

And we’d love to quote this to you guys. So with that. And you have the QR. Sure. Yeah. There seems to they seem to be coming in. I was concentrating on presenting here, but, uh, I’m just going to touch on, uh, question eight there from Dino about the power factor. And, uh, so just real quick, um, because it’s an active front end and it’s not just a regular active front, it’s a three level active front end. So it’s the most efficient active front end you can get. And it doesn’t, uh, it doesn’t amplify the common mode voltage problem. In fact, it mitigates it quite well. So we’re a little different from other people’s, uh, active front end.

But when it comes to the power factor, um, uh, the active front end, it’s able and we have a graph that we can send you as well that it’s able to keep, um, you know, that unity power factor near unity, power factor when full load. And as you drop down in speed or load, we’re able to stay above ninety five all the way down to sixty five percent speed or sixty five percent load, depending on what your combination is. And then as you get below that, we, we outperform all vfds. But this other one. There’s another trap involved with the with power factor. That’s with passive harmonic filters. And with active harmonic filters, they’re an external item.

Of course to the VFD they have capacitors in them. And those degrade with your ambient heat and things like that and age. And they don’t last as long as people think. Um and your passive harmonic filters, they’re tuned to a certain speed. So if you drop below that speed, your power factor is going to go out to whack. And your harmonics are going to come back. So you might start off well with a harmonic filter for a couple years, but then all of a sudden those caps start to degrade and your power factor and your, uh, your efficiencies go out, your harmonics start to come back. So that’s something to keep an eye out for. We take, we mitigate all of that.

We prevent that problem. Those capacitors. So just wanted to get that question real quick. Fantastic. Um, so we have quite a few other questions. Um, and there are a number of them on our product range and just reading quickly through all of those product range questions. Um, I think a lot of people would love us to have, uh, the full product range already. So today, um, as I mentioned, uh, fifteen to seventy five horsepower is the range. Uh, we have, uh, we have two other frame sizes that are, um, in development and will be released shortly. Um, so our five to fifteen and then seventy five to one hundred and fifty. Um, I saw Elliott ask about medium voltage options.

We do not have them yet. So, um, you know, um, with, uh, as we grow our market, I’m sure we will set our eyes on those, uh, uh, medium voltage. But for now, we’re focused on that range. Um, I think there was, um. In four volt, we go up to one twenty five. So I think that was one of the questions about. Four good, good good point, good point. Yeah, I combined both. Um. Uh, see, uh, what are your thoughts on the CE mark. So yeah, the, the range today is CE mark. And then we do have a partner in Europe. So, um, that is something typically, uh, c comes, uh, is released, uh, just a little later than our c u l us uh, certification.

Um, terrific. Let me touch. Touch on pricing now where do we fit in the market? Um, so we are out of the box for amoeba one wall mount drive with the touch screen, uh, HDMI and the stop start push buttons. So you can take it out of the box. You can mount it on the wall. Um, but our, our main, and that’s, that’s full protection on the front and the back. Right. Um, but our, what we’re really after, we’re really competing against is, uh, panels and your bill of material on panels. So if you were to just compare us to a naked chassis mount Hvac drive, it’s not really, uh, our play because you would normally have to add to that.

You would add harmonic filtering and you would add load filtering and then you would analyze everything. So where do we fit in the market is we compete very well, uh, against panels, against mfcs that require even key filters and things like that. Uh, we shrink those packages. So what you’ll find is, I will be saving the capital costs. Once you have to look at the package. And so that’s where we compete. Um, and, uh, we have some comparisons for you and things like that that we can share. So hopefully that answers the question. Great. Thanks, Josh. Uh, I’m seeing also one here. Uh, can I operate multiple motors with one VFD just for starting the motor?

So definitely you can have multiple motors on a single drive. We, uh, talk about that and the example about AG. So we’re having a lot of these. And we actually have an application note on our website for using our drive with multiple motors and some of the, um, you might be thinking about, uh, sequential start, uh, depending on the context. And so sequential start will leave that with the PLC guide to set up if you want to add whatever panel, um, contact your array that they may use with that PLC. So within the drive itself, we don’t do a sequential start. So just in case that was the context. Um also seeing a question here from Aldo, does the VFD support uh, permanent magnet and synchronous motors.

Um, so it’s built to support it. We have not deployed those algorithms yet. Um, it is in high demand. So it is um, being worked on and I hope Josh is, uh, one of the big fans of pushing our team to release them ASAP. So it will come in the near future. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Um, not just not just pumps applications. There’s a question there on application. Uh, yes, our nameplate ratings are variable torque ratings. Um, but of course, our data sheets show that you just have to go up to the next rating to get your constant torque rating on that. And, um, so it doesn’t have to be just pumps. We do fans, of course. Um, but we can do constant work, uh, applications, conveyors, um, not all kinds of lifts, uh, some kinds of lists only because, uh, there may be some additional elevator type applications that you might need some coordination to go on there.

Uh, so we are in ninety percent of the applications out there, whether it’s compressors, uh, winders, and so on and so forth. We can handle that. Um. Do you offer this drive in two hundred and forty volt, three phase configuration? Um, so not today, but yes, it is our plan to have of two hundred forty volt three phase and also two forty volt single phase. So I was talking about the ag industry. The ag industry is nagging us about that single phase support. The egg. Egg. There you go. Yeah. Um, just so you know, I have another presentation starting in about fifteen, so I’m gonna scoot away. I will have it from here. Josh, thanks for being with me.

Um, see everyone later. So yeah, questions keep on coming in. Uh, so, Matt, uh, back to that slide. Uh, did you experience any voltage drop was, um. So definitely. We’re not a defeating physics. There is a voltage drop. Um, the cables had been sized for long runs. So from that perspective, um, and there is a capability because we have an active front end to boost, uh, the output. So you can actually output, you know, a true forty volt, not a four sixty to compensate that voltage drop. I can’t tell you exactly what was the voltage in that case. Um, but that is definitely an advantage of for the motor side of having reactive front end that capability to boost it.

Um, Simon, while you’re taking a look at those questions, I just wanted to jump in and remind attendees, um, if you’d like a certificate of participation for today’s webinar, you can download one by clicking the view certificate button. And if we don’t get to your question today, we will get those questions to Simon and the smart team so that they can answer the rest of those offline. Yeah. Um, I’m actually seeing two questions here for which I would definitely, um, like to have. Josh. So I’m gonna leave them for answering, uh, by him later on. Um, I’m seeing also a question about. Can you comment on motors with integral AC, AC, vfds and or printed circuit board motors with integral Vfds.

Um, so, so typically, uh, you know, motors that have on board VFD. The biggest challenge is you’re combining the heat loss from the motor with the heat loss of the VFD. And so you’re limited typically in size. So, um, there’s definitely benefits to, to having those in terms of efficiency, in terms of having the inverter right beside the motor. Um, but there are limits to what sizes you can do with that type of configuration. And initially that’s where, why we started our, um, our product design at fifteen hp and did not look at the lower one. Now we are seeing, um, requests for those lower Horsepowers. Um, Namely in the egg industry and others.

But those integrated um. Motors and drives are a good solution at those lower, uh uh, Horsepowers. Um. So what is the typical heat loss in VFD? Uh, so, um, typically our drive run at about ninety six percent, uh, efficiency and um, that, and that really, as I mentioned, becomes furious system efficiency because you’re not having those and neither the motor cable or, uh, the transformer. So, um, but you’re, it’s all, um, concentrated in the drive. See another question here. Uh, do you have drives that are Nema four rated? No, not today. You would have to work with a panel shop. Um, one that just came in to use with generator power.

Would there be an issue or upsizing to consider? So, um, that is definitely one of the benefits of the, uh, drive with low harmonic is you don’t need to upsize your generator as you would typically. Same thing with the transformer and the key factor. You don’t need to upsize it because you’re going to have three or four percent, uh, harmonic, and you’re not going to get that forty percent, uh, where you would have to upsize upsize it. Um. And this is the one question. Okay. Uh, that one we will answer because it’s quite long, um, turndown ratio. That’s a question for Josh and power factor. So last three questions that are left.

I’m all gonna just let them to Josh and we’ll follow up with, um, after the webinar. Any other last question? Yep. Amy. Yeah. Um, if you have questions that you haven’t sent in, uh, feel free to keep sending those in. We’ll get them over to the smart team. Um, like Simon said, we’ll answer any of those offline. Uh, but that brings our webinar to a close. Um, Simon. And of course, also to Josh. Thank you for that great presentation. Uh, we’d like to thank them and smart technologies for today’s presentation and attendees. You can look for an email from us later today where you’ll be able to access playback and presentation from this event.

But please also feel free to visit Pumps and Systems dot com for more on this topic and additional educational webinars, including those from the smart team. Um, thank you to everyone for taking the time to join us today. We hope you have a great day. Thanks, everyone.