The TMdrive-Guardian outdoor enclosure for medium voltage drives from Toshiba Mitsubishi-Electric Industrial Systems Corporation (TMEIC) has won the 2020 New Product Innovation Award for its thermal management solution for MV drives from Frost & Sullivan. The Guardian comprises an indoor electric drive with a NEMA-3R rated enclosure that allows users to deploy the drive outdoors, close to the motor it controls.
"Through its unique heat dissipation design, Guardian’s MV drive cabinet eliminates the need for an HVAC system to manage the waste heat from the drive; thereby, drastically minimizing operational expenditure," said analyst Krishna Raman. "The design of the drive enclosure has been adopted from TMEIC’s solar inverters, which are largely deployed outdoors. TMEIC is one of the few manufacturers that provides outdoor MV drives and is the sole solution provider that supplies MV drives with their own enclosures. This makes Guardian the only NEMA-3R rated solution in which the MV drive is protected from harsh outdoor conditions in the temperature range of -40 degrees C to +50 degrees C."
By placing the drives in a separate enclosure away from the control room, it offers an additional, distinctive layer of safety for the operator. Its in-built intelligence within the enclosure control unit monitors critical conditional parameters such as the temperature of the enclosure, temperature of the transformer, and relative humidity. Based on these three inputs, the controller regulates the exhaust air flow. Similarly, the drive has a control unit to monitor parameters such as temperature of the power semiconductor device, temperature of the transformer and current drawn by the blower fans. These data sets can be used to auto-adjust the air flow mechanism or to identify underlying faults.
All of this data can be made available on the local area network at the customer site using standard communication protocols such as ModBus, Ethernet Global Data and TCP/IP. Users can also collect and analyze the data to implement Industrial Internet of Things environments.
