Water leakages and clogging reduced with PSTX softstarter

One of the biggest issues in the water industry is water leakages. It falls into two categories – background leaks and bursts/breaks. Background leakage is the overall effect of losses from all the fittings in the network. Such leaks are typically too small to detect individually. Burst/breaks leakage occurs from holes or fractures in the network that can be located using a range of specialist equipment.

The number one reason for burst pipes is pressure transients in a water network that could stem from several different causes, but the most damaging by far are the ones created rapidly over a small distance. For example, when:

• A valve is opened or closed too fast, a pump inducing suction instantaneously or a large water user such as an industrial plant is opening or closing its supply.
• The kinetic energy of the water is transferred into strain energy on the network, and a shock wave, or water hammer, is sent through the system.

These effects are caused in many cases by a direct online start or stop that makes the water flow quickly into or out of the system. These leakages can be minimized with the PSTX softstarter. There are two functions that will have a significant impact. The first is the soft pipe fill which reduces pressure transients when starting the pump. The second is called torque control, it will help to eliminate water hammering.

Water leakage costs water companies around the world millions every year. A substantial amount of that money can be saved by using the PSTX softstarter from ABB.

Benefits with soft pipe fill and torque control:

• Reduce pressure transients at startup
• Eliminate water hammering and reduce leakage through bursts
• Reduce reactive visits or service calls

Clogged or blocked pumps in sewage networks are causing huge problems globally. The cost can be over a hundred million USD for the industry in a single country.

Every time a pump is blocked, costs like cranage and technician time are incurred, combined with the fact that the cleaning task is dirty and necessitates special attention to health and safety due to risks such as gases, debris, and hypodermics needles, etc.

These high maintenance costs can, in many cases, be reduced with the pump cleaning function that you can find in the PSTX softstarter from ABB. The pump cleaning function performs several cleaning cycles triggered at every start or when it detects a blocked pump through torque monitoring or through time set points.

The pump cleaning function is a standard feature in the PSTX softstarters. It is a sequence of cleaning cycles in a series of slow reverse and fast forward rotations of the impeller. The intelligent pump control menu has an easy-to-use wizard feature that will help to set up the function for different pump applications.

Benefits with the pump cleaning function:

• Reduces downtime and lowers manual cleaning costs
• Minimize pump blockages
• Less energy consumption
• Pump cleaning cycles can be customized
• The cleaning cycle counter indicates preventive maintenance