Previously such pump-cleaning functions have been available only in variable-speed drives.
“A wastewater pump can experience clogging, which will reduce the flow and efficiency of the whole pump system,” explains Morten Wierod, managing director of ABB’s control products business. “The PSTX softstarter offers continuous water flow to households and industrial applications as the built-in pump cleaning will help avoid pump jamming and water hammering. We added a pump-clearing feature that can reverse pump flow to loosen up clogging increasing uptime of any pump system.”
The new softstarters are also designed to protect motors from power supply and load irregularities, thus extending their operating lives. “PSTX is able to detect both load and network irregularities and can make diagnostics of the quality of the network,” says Wierod. “It can also assess the time needed for a motor to cool down.”
A motor heating function can keep an idle motor warm and dry in cold or humid environments, thus preventing it from freezing. The PSTX, which is aimed at low-voltage motors with operating currents from 30–570A, can also reduce starting currents by more than 60%, even when fast starts are needed – for example, on scroll compressors.