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Charlotte Stonestreet
Managing Editor |
Editor's Pick
Fuji Electric enters a new era in the UK
13 December 2019
Operating with an international strategy over five business segments – power and new energy; power electronics; electronic devices; food and beverage distribution, drives & automation – Fuji Electric is entering a new era within the EU and UK markets.
The business, established in Japan in 1923 and now with 27,000 employees internationally, has an extensive global presence with 104 offices across 21 countries and annual turnover in excess of 8 billion Euros. Looking more locally, at the European operation, the EU headquarters was established in Germany in 1987 and today has revenues on 111 Million Euro and satellite offices in France, Italy, UK, Switzerland, and Spain. The technical centre in is located in Barcelona, Spain.
Within the company's Drives & Automation division are many series of Variable Frequency Drives and Active Front End devices (HMI/operator interface), deigned to meet every application from general purpose drives, drives for lift, crane & hoist applications and dedicated VFDs for the building automation applications such as HVAC, from 0.1kW to a massive 3MW in Low Voltage applications. Also, within the Fuji Electric Drives & Automation portfolio are touch screen operator interface solutions with many options to meet the requirements of the user.
Component development
Fuji Electric not only manufactures its VSDs, it also develops and manufactures the internal components such as the IGBT stacks (Insulated-Gate Bipolar Transistor), which are often sold to and used by their competition. This allows Fuji Electric to stay out in front with the latest technology, using only the newest of its IGBT development.
Commenting on the UK customer base and applications, Stuart Cardall (Branch Manager for Fuji Electrics UK business) says: “We actively pursue new markets & opportunities, in part, due to the maturity of the traditional markets & applications such as conveying & packaging machines.
"By considering the needs of industry and enhancing our CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility), our focus has moved towards positive environmental applications and niece markets such as bio-digesters, where we see a strong “green” message through the reduction of landfill and subsequently reducing risk in contamination to the water table.
“Further recent applications include vertical farming where we are able to improve efficiency of food production through automated plant feeding & watering not to forget efficient harvesting & storage techniques, reducing farm footprints and delivering freshness to the consumer.
“Water purification, desalination & reverse osmosis, where the inclusion of a VFD in the application improves performance alongside user benefits of reducing power consumption, thus saving energy and costs, and allows a smaller footprint and generally greater system efficiency.”
Another differentiator for Fuji is the assembly of complete cabinet solutions for drives, produced in Europe, where they can provide the drive mounted inside and all required peripheral equipment also mounted. These drive cabinet solutions are finished with a high IP (Ingress Protection) rating and allow Fuji to handle large capacity variable speed drives.
Behind every first class product there is the offer of a first class support and service - application and technical support is available locally and through the technical centre in Barcelona. This team, using the latest in multimedia tools to provide remote support, or on-site guidance and advice can help the user maximise the benefits of the products, even so far as giving help with system coding for both the VSDs and HMIs.
Training is important in all aspects of industrial automation, improving the knowledge both in the OEM and end user, improving user confidence of the application and configuration of both VFDs and HMIs. The answer from FUJI Electric is to provide a series of structured training courses, held at the technical centre in Barcelona. This training is provided free of charge and cover topics such as IoT security, new ways of energy saving through their VSD series, EMC requirements, set-up and connectivity to fieldbus systems and the general configuration of the Variable Speed Drive and Operator Interface solutions.
For the latest news and updates from Fuji take a look at the company's LinkedIn page at https://www.linkedin.com/company/fuji-electric-europe-drives-automation/
New multipurpose drives
Intended for general purpose applications as well as special applications such as solar pumping, heavy duty crane & hoist, HVAC and conveyor use, FUJI Electric has launched the multi-purpose FRENIC-Ace and FRENIC-Mini Variable Speed Drives.
The FRENIC-Ace (FRN-E2) has been designed to offer the highest levels of performance in a small package, while being rugged enough to be used in many different environments. The device has customisable logic (max. 200 steps) and offers a wide variety of functions to ensure it can be tuned to offer the best performance match for each individual application. It can operate at a number of output capacities from 01.kW to 315kW with the capability to deliver 150% for 1 minute or 200% for 0.5 seconds or 120% for 1 min in a quadruple rating selection.
The FRENIC-Ace drive has CANOpen & Modbus RTU communications built in to allow the device to be quickly and easily added to existing networks or to establish full communication with our HMI series. For safety-critical applications, the device has STO (Safety Torque Off), is compliant to EN/ISO13849-1, SIL3, cat.3 and meets the highest safety level - Performance Level e (Ple).
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