ABB Drives help Flooded Water Recycling Centre

Quick supply of ABB drives helps water recycling centre recover from flooding!

A water recycling centre has recovered from serious flooding thanks to quick work by ABB authorised value provider Inverter Drive Systems (IDS). The company was on site within two hours of receiving the call from North Ferry Water Recycling Centre to assess what was needed. IDS supplied replacement ABB variable-speed drives (VSDs) from stock the next day to help the centre get back into operation.

Anglian Water’s North Ferry Water Recycling Centre, sited on the banks of the Humber estuary, was badly affected by the tidal storm surge that struck the east coast in early December 2013. The centre was flooded to a depth of over a metre, causing extensive damage to the site’s electrical supplies and motors and interrupting operations.
A temporary 90 kW hire drive was installed in order to get one of the site outfall pumps up and running. This meant that the incoming flows could be diverted whilst the site electrical control panels were being dried out.

ABB Drives help Flooded Water Recycling Centre

Grahame Hardy, Anglian Water’s Area Programme Leader for refurbishment projects, says: “The flooding was detected on the Friday night and soon extended across the whole site. Within a few minutes, the main fuses had blown and we had a total shutdown of all operations. One major problem was that the flooding damaged a number of variable-speed drives, including the unit powering the outflow pumps that discharges treated effluent into the River Humber.”

Anglian Water has had a framework agreement with ABB for five years for the supply of variable-speed drives and has worked closely with IDS for some time. “We have worked with IDS on energy efficiency projects, fitting various applications with VSDs and we have built up a good relationship with them. IDS are always very helpful and will respond very quickly.”

Staff could not get on to the site for a whole day. When they assessed the damage, Hardy called IDS engineers, who went on to site the same day to determine what was needed. The first priority was to get the outfall pumps back in operation so that effluent could be pumped away from site through the registered route.

Zac Dorn of IDS says: “The original outfall pumps’ VSDs, two 75 kW ACS800s, had been submerged. We removed these drives and bought them back to our works for drying out and triage; they had sustained serious damage and were uneconomical to repair.”

Says Dorn: “We provided two 75 kW ACS800 VSDs from our own stock to get the outfall pumps operational in a short time, rather than waiting the usual four week delivery time.”