- The sales training was designed to support Remtron, a valued member of ABB’s Channel Partner network in Australia, to help their team gain new insight into power quality methods, harmonic mitigation, and calculative power quality tools that support ABB's water, general purpose, industrial, and HVAC-dedicated drives
- The hybrid training webinar included hands-on product demonstrations to teach learners about a range of important drive products topics and typical industry application challenges
- The program was delivered by ABB Motion Australia’s Drives Product Manager Christopher Probst
The problem with harmonics
All power networks have some level of distortion in them – with one of the most common types of distortion being harmonics. This introduces losses in the network which waste energy and increase costs. Harmonics can also cause interference to sensitive electrical equipment, resulting in damage to network efficiency and reliability. This can lead to severe problems for critical applications in environments such as hospitals, utilities, data centres, and industrial operations.
Harmonics was just one of the important topics covered in a hybrid training webinar for ABB Channel Partner Remtron, on May 5th 2023 at their office located in Braeside, Victoria. ABB Australia Drives Product Manager Christopher Probst delivered the training to over 20 Remtron employees attending in-person and virtually nationwide, with a mix of roles and responsibilities including sales and business development, engineers, technicians, and account managers.
They learnt that due to the inherent way traditional 6-pulse drives consume electrical energy, they commonly introduce harmonics into the power supply network. But ABB has solved this challenge by developing special ultra-low harmonic (ULH) drives. They require no complex filters, multi-pulse arrangements or special transformers to reduce harmonics, since they produce hardly any harmonics in the first place. The total harmonic current distortion is typically <3%.
Additionally, because ABB’s ULH drives achieve unity power factor, energy is used more efficiently while avoiding potentially costly harmonic-related problems.
Supplementary important topics covered in the training included those around power quality methods, the benefits of ABB’s water-dedicated ACQ580 drives, HVAC-dedicated ACH580 drives, ACS880 ULH Industrial Drives, plus, a demonstration of harmonic analysis software tools.
When asked what most stood out to them about the training delivered, Remtron attendees mentioned software tools such as ABB’s DriveSize. DriveSize helps user to select an optimal motor, drive and transformer for energy efficiency and to compute network harmonics as well as create dimensioning documents.
Harvey Dao, Application Engineer at Remtron, getting hands-on training with a water-dedicated ABB ACQ580 drive 
Christopher Probst (standing) talking about ABB’s wide range of ultra-low harmonic drives, and the importance of mitigating harmonics distortion in networks 
The Remtron team attending the session in-person from their office in Braeside, Victoria
Attendees said that especially for farming customers, their biggest concern is power consumption and avoiding network disturbances. So being able to calculate their energy savings and ensuring their infrastructure is optimal for the operation and that it complies with power quality standards goes a long way.
"These trainings delivered by ABB ensures our team remains well-informed about the latest technology for the industries we work in"
Naveen Nadesan, National Sales & Marketing Manager for Remtron says, “these trainings delivered by ABB ensures our team remains well-informed about the latest technology for the industries we work in. The open dialogue exchange allows the group to look at common challenges our customers face and understand how we best solve them with recommendations from Product Managers like Christopher.”
Naveen says that Remtron feels strongly about supporting the upskilling of their sales force and making it easier for them to know exactly where to get additional information when needed and what new tools are available.
He continues, “being able to get hands-on with ABB technology and doing that live with the whole team opens a window of opportunity for everyone to further understand each other’s individual skills and expertise and learn how to leverage that. It also allows them to become more confident about pinpointing the root cause of an application issue for our customers so that we get it right the first time.”
When asked about the objectives and positive outcomes of these sales training programs Christopher Probst says, “these sessions facilitate optimal knowledge transfer and give attendees the confidence to implement and specify ABB Drives.”
“It empowers our Channel Partners to be part of ABB’s market-leading domain expertise network, thereby being a direct example of how we collectively deliver value-add to the customer experience with advantages beyond products.”
