Power, Grounding, Surge Protection for Industrial, Factory, & Laboratory Applications

Think of power going into your electronics as putting food into your body.  If you put bad food in your body then you'll get sick!  If you put bad power into your electronics then you will have problems.  If you want a stable, error free process, then clean up the power before it gets to your equipment.  

There are several layers of protection:

1. Circuit breakers and fuses protect in case of shorts.  If you have three phase power it is important to make sure all three phases are disconnected if only one phase shorts.  
2. Surge suppressors
3. Isolation transformers
4. Noise filters
5. Reactors
6. Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS)

Circuit breakers and fuses perform the same function so you don't use both.  Also you can have several layers of circuit breakers / fuses -- on each piece of equipment, on the machine, electrical branch, area power, etc. 

Isolation transformers, noise filters, and reactors perform the same function so typically only one of these is used.  

One important thing to think about is how important is noise suppression in a specific application.  For example, if an application only has discrete inputs and outputs that are all 120 VAC (no analog) then it probably does not make sense to spend a lot of money on noise suppression.  However, on systems with both variable frequency drives and accurate analog I/O, we install considerable filtering on the drives and the control system to keep them isolated and reduce the noise as much as possible.  

Links

• Acopian -- (AC/DC and DC/DC) Power Supplies including 24 VDC power supplies
• Brooks Power Systems -- outlet strips, data protectors
• Bussmann -- busbars, fuses, 
• CareBase 
• Citel -- surge protectors
• Coilcraft -- EMI / RFI filters
• Condor -- power supplies
• Control Concepts -- Power protection, surge protection
• Controlled Power Company -- UPS, emergency lighting, power conditioning, isolation transformers, DC power supplies
• Corcom -- EMI / RFI AC / DC power filters
• CR Magnetics -- current transformers, transducers, hall effect DC current sensors
• Current Technology -- surge suppression solutions
• Cylix -- data line surge protection
• Delta -- EMI filters for AC motor drives
• Dongan -- Transformers  
• E-Clips -- surge protection
• Electrocube -- EMI filters and snubbers
• Electronic Specialists  -- isolation transformers, power conditioners, ground noise eliminators, filter - isolators, voltage regulators
• Energy Technologies   
• ETronic -- Ferrite EMI suppresion filters
• Fair-Rite Products -- Ferrite beads, cores, evaluation kits
• Filter Concepts -- AC, DC, 3 phase, custom EMI filters
• Flex-Core -- Measurement, Monitoring, Recording and Control of Current, Power and Energy
• GE Industrial Systems 
• Ground Loops White paper 1
• Ground Loops White paper 2
• Innovative Technology -- surge protection
• Joslyn -- surge protection
• Lambda -- power supplies
• LCR Electronics -- industrial, appliance, facility, military, telecom filters
• Lightning Master -- bonding and grounding, surge suppression, lightning protection, tecto welding
• MTE -- RFI / EMI filters for AC / DC motor drives and other electronic equipment
• Ohio Semitronics -- voltage, current, power, frequency measurement
• Optimum Power
• Panamax -- surge protection
• Phoenix Contact -- industrial power supplies -- linear, switching, rectifiers, DC/DC converters
• Power One -- Power Supplies
• Powervar -- solutions for power quality
• Power Conditioning -- Andrew Grygus Automation Access
• Sola Hevi Duty -- power supplies, power conditioners, surge suppression, transformers, uninterruptible power supplies UPSs
• Scan-Data -- Lightning surge and I/O protection
• Schaffner -- EMI / RFI filters and chokes
• Spectrum Control -- power strips, EMI filters, DC breakers, noise filtering, filtering connectors
• Steward -- EMI suppression & inductive components
• Todd Systems

• Tripp Lite Power Protection -- Uninterruptible power supplies UPS, surge suppression, line conditions, isolation transformers, DC to AC inverters

• TSI Power -- UPS, inverters, line conditioners

Tips & Tricks

1. Use fuses and circuit breakers liberally.  This protects the equipment, users, facilitates troubleshooting, and minimizes potentially dangerous situations.
2. Power is like putting food into your body.  Clean up power to reduce problems.  
3. Follow good grounding practices.
4. For control systems, use a surge suppressor, isolation transformer, and Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS).  Your control system will have fewer "glitches" and you'll have fewer problems.  
5. Any cables that go outside should have lightning protection. 
6. The more accurate the signal you are trying to measure -- the more you need to do to clean your power. 
7. Motors and drives are the worst at generating noise.  Use (preferrably) EMI filters or at least reactors to minimize the noise. 

Do you like "phantom" problems that occur when you least expect it?  Do you like getting pressure calls at night and on the weekends?  A lot of people won't pay for proper grounding, isolation transformers, noise filtering, surge protection and other items listed on this page because they can not see all of the problems that they eliminate.  Follow the ideas presented on this page and you will find that many difficult to diagnose problems are eliminated.  

We try to offer a fair and balanced opinion on every page of our website.  We would appreciate more information from other users to express their opinions which we will then incorporate.  If you have questions or comments please post them on our message board (see button in left hand column) so that others can read and benefit.