Well,well,well , my boss has me walk some guys around the plant showing them all the electrical panels . They tell me their unit doesn't have any capacitors in it . " NASA " type technology they say .They say T8 lamps will last longer . They are going to "Costa Rica " to install them for the power company there .They say we might get up to 39% energy savings even though they only guarantee 20%.Showed my boss the answers from my earlier thread will just have to see if he buys into it when he gets their quote .
The "NASA" technology is now very old. Did I mention that in the other thread? Oh well, I've spewed on this so many times I've lost track... So here's the unsolicited history lesson.
It's actually called the "Nola Circuit" because it was invented by a NASA Engineer named Frank Nola in 1968 while he was working on ways to conserve energy on an eventual space station. He noticed that when a motor is unloaded, it has poor power factor. So he deduced that IF a motor has a poor power factor, THEN it must be unloaded! Seems obvious, but he was the first to take action on it. What he did was adapt a known technology called Phase Angle Control of SCRs to reduce the voltage going to a motor WHEN IT WAS RUNNING UNLOADED. The reason is, about 25% of the LOSSES in the motor are what are called "core losses" or "magnetic losses" and are voltage dependent. So if you reduce the voltage, you reduce that portion of the losses. Another percentage of the losses are resistance losses, or copper losses and are current dependent, so if you reduce the voltage, you reduce the current and therefore you reduce the resistance losses. So by using his power factor monitoring system and the phase angle control of SCRs, he looks for an unloaded motor and reduces the voltage, so a
portion of the losses are reduced. It's a small portion, but when you are running a space station on batteries, everything helps. The key here is the UNLOADED state of the motor. If you reduce voltage (without reducing frequency like in a VFD), you lose torque at the SQUARE of the voltage reduction. So you lose torque very fast. But if the motor is unloaded, you obviously don't need the torque! That was the idea behind the "Nola Power Factor Controller"; it didn't
control power factor, it
used a measurement of power factor to detect an unloaded condition so it could reduce losses.
But because Nola worked for NASA, and JFK had made a promise to industry that NASA technology paid for by tax dollars would be made available to industry free of charge, EVERYONE jumped all over this in the first energy crisis as a panacea for saving electricity. Companies sprang out of the woodwork making "Energy Savers" with "NASA technology" in the 70's and early 80's, many of who have survived to become relatively successful companies (I worked for one called Vectrol, who was bought by Westinghouse and later spun off again as Motortronics).
But here is how the funny numbers ruined the game:
All total, core losses amount to about 25% of the total losses in the motor, resistance losses account for another 25%, the rest are fixed losses or are load dependent so they don't count. So by reducing voltage in an unloaded state, you could reduce those losses by as much as 80% (under lab conditions), but that was 80% of 50%, so they claimed that you would reduce losses by 40% (or 39%, or 38%, whatever the marketing people thought would sell). But they went too far with that. You are not reducing the ENERGY by 40%, you are reducing a PORTION of the LOSSES by 40%.
This technology came to being in the 70s and 80s, BEFORE the advent of energy efficient motors by the way, so on average the motors were 80% efficient. That means that only 20% of the energy was losses, and of that total losses, only 10% was able to be reduced. So the technology saved 40% of 10% of the motor energy used, which is only 4% of the total energy, and only when the motor was running UNLOADED! Turned out that doesn't happen as much as the marketing people claimed it did.
Needless to say, it wasn't long before users figured that out, and most of those "Energy Savers" went the way of the Dodo, or adapted and changed by becoming Soft Starter manufacturers and eventually dropped the "energy saver" marketing. But in the late 90's, the internet saw a resurgence of people resurrecting that Nola circuit as if it was some hidden secret that a government and utility conspiracy sought to squelch. They are spreading the same misinformation as before, some of them even use the same testimonials we used 30 years ago! They are unfortunately finding lots of prey in this new "energy crisis" (don't get me going on that one) among management types who are desperate to reduce their energy costs if there is any possible way.
The latest iteration is to forget the motors, because energy efficient motors have all but killed that concept; again (95% efficieny means it is now saving 40% of 5%, so 2%). So people are applying this old concept to lighting now. That's because new electronic ballasts are creating high harmonics, and high harmonics means a high "distortion" power factor. They are somehow managing to equate high distortion pf with being something the Nola controller can do something about. But that distortion pf has nothing to do with load, so really that thing just immediately reduces the voltage regardless and in lighting, if you reduce the voltage, you reduce current A
ND you reduce the light output! Sure the T8s last longer, but you can do the exact same thing with a dimmer! However, by putting he words "NASA" in the title (or "Space Age"), they are convincing desperate people that this is a viable solution. And how is that different from just taking out a few of the T8s and living with less overall light? It isn't.
It's just like fad diets, there are no magic boxes that reduce the pain of doing what you KNOW you have to do...
