Neutral Shift: Five Years of Continuous Operation with Adjustable Frequency Drives

The combined efforts of the AFD supplier and end-user have resulted in an extremely reliable electrical adjustable speed drive system. Almost three years into the run of the first unit, all parties are confident of the ability to meet the five-year run target that was identified at the outset. The redundancy of the power cells in this particular design, together with the neutral shift control has practically eliminated the power components as a source of operational failure. Future development efforts will include applying redundancy and fault tolerance to the drive control processor to further enhance system reliability.