Energy recovery

 

Energy recovery – a valuable contribution to reducing costs and CO2 emissions.

An increasingly important argument in favour of purchasing a system from Systraplan. Industrial electricity prices have rocketed over the past few years. According to the calculations of the Essen branch of the German Association of Industrial Energy Consumers (VIK), industrial electricity prices have virtually gone through the roof, with an increase of 35%. Systraplan tackled this subject at a very early stage and has been relying on the proven energy recovery technology for years.

Rising energy costs

Due in no small part to the continuously rising energy costs, the decision at Systraplan matured to utilise the braking energy released in their systems for powering the parallel movements within the machine line and to feed any surplus energy into the supply grid.

Growing demands on the motion dynamics of rack serve carriers

In the 1990’s, the increasing demands on the motion dynamics of rack serve carriers lead to the use of synchronous servo motors normally only used in highly dynamic machine tools. These drives have coefficients of efficiency exceeding 95%. However, regenerative energy produced by the braking or downward run of a rack serve carrier has to be electrically absorbed - this problem was already encountered in the earlier fitted three-phase drives with frequency converter and particularly applies to servo drives.

The only solution was to convert this energy into (useless) heat and simply allow it to dissipate.

If you take into account that a rack serve carrier designed for loads of approx. 1,000 kg (pallets) generates energy exceeding 50 kW (downward run at 1.5 m/s), you can imagine the extent of these braking resistances.

Energy is fed back into the supply grid

At Systraplan, we use servo motors in conjunction with respective power electronic components so that the energy produced by decelerating driving axles is not converted into heat via braking resistances but fed back into the supply grid. In this way, the energy (up to 30%) is directly made available to other devices and machines.