It's day two of Subsea Expo. Despite the down turn, there's still some good news, including new technology coming to the market.
OE, official media sponsor of the show, being held in Aberdeen this week, spoke to ABB's John Guthrie, Regional Sales Manager, about what the power and automation firm has to offer.
ABB is showcasing its HES880 Hybrid Electrical Drive as this year’s Subsea Expo. Tell us the background to the HES880. For example, what is the technology based on? Has it drawn technologies from elsewhere within ABB/the world?
HES880 Hybrid Electrical Drive, based on the marine certified ACS880 drive platform, provides kinetic energy recovery and local energy storage/release via supercapacitors or batteries. This offers a high performance active heave compensated drive train that consumes a fraction of the overall power of conventional systems and requires much lower power from the vessel. Together with a total current distortion of less than five percent, which exceeds today’s stringent marine standards, the drive is suitable for location in harsh deck environments.
The drive technology is based on ABB's direct torque control (DTC) motor control platform, which provides high levels of motor performance in high torque applications. Development has been going on in several industries, including heavy vehicle hybrid electric propulsion, and this has led to the HES880 product.
It is being offered to help improve offshore operations. Tell us how?
With the industry-wide drive away from hydraulic systems and environmental concerns around hydraulic oil contamination, the electrification of deck systems is becoming increasingly popular.
The issue around this, however, is how you protect sensitive electronic variable-speed drives (VSDs) from the harsh environment they experience in marine situations. Extremes of temperature, vibration and the constant exposure to salty air don't tend to aid the lifespan of standard VSD offerings. That means drives either have to be housed in containers on the deck, which takes up valuable deck space, or placed below deck, which involves laying additional wiring etc.
HES880 is protected to IP67, is liquid cooled with oil or a water/glycol mix and will withstand constant vibration to 4g as well as 30g shocks. This means for the first time we can offer an on-skid solution to the industry, making it more compact, more portable and easier to install. The modular units allow many configurations to be built up as required and the range consists of three basic power modules at 213A, 400A & 600A. These can be configured to be active front end to negate harmonic distortion which is always an issue on board vessels. What’s more, because the complete package, including the drive, has been pre-tested before it arrives on the vessel, there will be fewer, if any, compatibility issues.
How does the HES880 compare to existing systems in terms of price?
This is a new product and so there is a price differential compared to other solutions. However, this will be offset by efficiencies achieved by faster installation and commissioning times.
Has the system been “road tested” offshore yet? When do you hope to see sales?
HES880 is based on ABB’s DTC drive technology which has a proven track record in other industries. So although the HES880 is new, the technology behind it is well established.
ABB recently appointed MJR Power & Automation as its Authorised Value Provider to the marine and offshore industry and we hope its valuable experience in this sector will help drive sales this year.
What else will be on offer on the ABB stand at this year’s Subsea Expo?
We’re also exhibiting the X-Wave self-learning motion compensation system at Subsea Expo. X-Wave has been developed by MJR Power & Automation to plug the gap in the market for a versatile, portable and low cost active heave solution that can be installed on new or existing marine and offshore applications.
In the past it cost many thousands of pounds to integrate active heave compensation into an existing winch or crane systems, but with X-Wave, which features a range of automation, electrical and control equipment from ABB, it can be done for a fraction of the cost.
We have a scaled-down version of X-Wave on our stand and will be running life demos during the show.