Modern day industrial facilities contain large amounts of microprocessor-based equipment from control computers to field sensors. High-speed data is transferred around a site to allow business decisions to be made which affect productivity and efficiency. The realtime data used for such control and decision-making would be useless if corrupt and, worse still, the complete loss of such a system due to surges or lightning would impact on productivity and profits.
Much of the industrial equipment is installed in harsh environments, subject to natural disturbances such as lightning and man-made disturbances like switching transients from motors, pumps, welding equipment and variable frequency drives. Small transients and disturbances on the AC or data cables, whilst not causing catastrophic damage, will be slowly stressing the internal microprocessors ultimately leading to degradation, which manifests itself as errors or complete failure.
A direct lightning strike can be catastrophic and cause safety related failures, and potentially, plant shutdowns. The lightning does not have to strike directly; even a nearby strike within a few kilometres can be significantly damaging, causing minor failures and potentially stressing control or system hardware.
Surge protection for these industrial process applications can prevent the majority of upsets caused by surges and transients. It is essential as part of the plant infrastructure, and can prevent downtime and lost productivity. In all areas reliability will be enhanced increasing availability and uptime. MTL Surge Technologies have been at the forefront of industrial surge protection for the past 15 years and produce products for protecting all such facilities. Temperature Controls is the sole agent in South Africa for MTL.
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