Efficiency Improvement and Saving Energy within Electro-Pneumatic System Using VFD

Electro-pneumatic systems are considered very important part in most of industrial application especially in production line. However these systems experiences loss in energy which consequently decrease the system efficiency. First step in energy saving is to choose the best components, then using suitable controller that has high response and reliability such as Programmable Logic Control (PLC). Also controlling mass flow that comes out from the compressor through motor performance variation. This control aims to reduce power consumption through the compressor. In this paper, a simple production line of filling water bottles is controlled by PLC. The system compressor is connected to Variable Frequency Driver (VFD). Pneumatic system is simulated in software called automation studio. VFD is simulated in MATLAB (R) Simulink and results are confirmed experimentally. Adding VFD improves the motor performance by increasing the torque and the speed while reducing the power consumption. VFD also can control the system productivity.