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UK-China tie-up offers medium voltage drives
Published:  10 June, 2012

The British engineering group Severn Glocon has joined forces with a Chinese power electronics manufacturer, RXPE, to form a UK company offering medium voltage variable speed drives. The new business, Severn RXPE Drives & Energy, made its debut at the recent Drives & Controls Show.

The Gloucester-based business will operate alongside an existing arm of Severn Glocon’s renewables activities which supplies static Var compensators and active harmonic filters. The MV drives will be designed and built at RXPE’s Chinese factory with Severn Glocon handling sales and supply, as well as installing and servicing the drives.

RXPE is well-established as a supplier of MV drives and holds more than 30 patents and ten software copyrights. Its products, for single- or four-quadrant applications, include regenerative options. The new business will be offering two 50/60Hz ranges:
♦   the RMVC, which accepts inputs from 2.3–18kV and produces outputs from 2.3–10kV, 0–120Hz, up to 15MVA (single-quadrant) or 5.8MVA (four-quadrant regenerative); and
♦   the RMVC5 Compact, for inputs from 2.3–11kV, with single-quadrant outputs from 2.3–10kV, 0–120Hz, up to 4MVA.

RXPE’s drives incorporate multi-level converters based on cascaded single-phase H-bridge inverters used in series. They produce an output voltage that is close to sinusoidal, allowing retrofits to old motors and avoiding the need for output transformers (and output filters, in most cases). Power factors are better than 0.95, and input filters and PFC equipment are usually not needed.

“The quality, integrity and value of RXPE’s product range is well-proven,” says Jonathan Jones, director of Severn Glocon’s renewable energy division. “Teaming this with a well-established global infrastructure makes for a very powerful proposition. With our heritage in intelligence-led engineering, we have a lot to offer the MV drive and renewables marketplace. We believe we can play an important role helping the sector realise significant improvements in efficiency and performance.”