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PBSI Group has announced the completion of a major programme of man-ufacturing expansion in the UK, increasing production volumes of its switchgear, relays and earthing equipment products. Bucking the down-

ward trend in manufacturing outlay, PBSI Group has invested in new product designs, increased capacity and advanced production engineering technology.

PBSI GROUP INVESTS IN MANUFACTURING

Providing electrical protection, distribution and control Spring 2011

The company has developed its facilities at its Belle Vue, Manchester, and Corsham, Wiltshire, plants. At Belle Vue capacity has been added for switchgear and relay manu-facturing by the addition of state of the art electronics production lines, while at Cor-sham fully automatic CNC lathes and mill-ing machines have been installed to boost its earthing equipment, Buchholz relay and instruments output.

The PBSI Group that consists of P&B Switch-gear, P&B Relays, P&B Technical Services and P&B Weir Electrical, designs and makes prod-ucts for power generation, electrical distribu-tion, rail infrastructure, oil and gas industries, general industrial and mining installations as well as educational instruments.

P&B Switchgear’s business for new and ret-rofitted switchgear is experiencing growth, thanks in large part to a regime of replacing aged air break and oil filled circuit breakers. Similarly, for P&B Relays, substations in the industrial and energy distribution sectors

increasingly look to upgrade and automate switchgear systems. P&B Weir serves some specialised sectors that require relays like the Buchholz relay that protects oil filed transformers and its electrical safety prod-ucts, principally for earth bonding, are being supplied in volume to satisfy infrastructure renewal.

Keith Hamilton, Group Managing Direc-tor commented, “at a time when many UK manufacturers have been forced to rationa-lise their operations and put moratoria on investments, we have sufficient confidence to spend a seven figure sum on new equip-ment and, significantly, on new product de-signs”. He added, “PBSI Group has a raft of new products that meet both current and emerging markets. Our present growth, and business we confidently predict, means we need the increased capacity”.

By Pam Ranger

The PBSI Group Limited exhibited at the Middle East Electricity event in Dubai earlier this year. The company travelled with a BEAMA contingent from the UK looking to satisfy a growing need for P+B products in the region.

P&B Switchgear sees the Middle Eastern market for both new switchgear and retrofit equipment growing as a result of new building and infrastructure development. P&B Relays’ state of the art protection relays will also find both new markets and retrofit applications. The products’ advanced features are an attractive benefit in the MEE market. P&B Weir’s portable earthing equipment is vital to the safety of personnel working on new and existing transmission & distribution electrical power lines as well as in power stations.

The Exhibition took place against a backdrop of rising trade between UK manufacturers and customers in the Middle East. Indeed, in the United Arab Emirates alone, trade with the UK increased to about £6 billion in the first nine months of 2010. Kuwait has announced that its power capacity will rise by one third from 12,000MW to 17,500MW by 2014. In the Lebanon, electricity generation is up 5.8% in 2010 and the list of investments and developments throughout the Middle East is extensive.

West meets East

PBSI Group managing Director Keith Hamilton reports the company has the confidence to buck the trends when it comes to investments

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In spite of a constrained infrastructure marketplace, P&B Protection Relays reports that the market for retrofit protection relays is improving strongly. The company cites the essential need to replace ageing electromechanical as well as older static electronic

relays facilitates the moves toward establishing intelligent distribution systems in readi-ness for potential Smart Grid implementation.

Retrofit relays market sparks into life

P&B Relays has observed that users are ex-ploiting the need to replace old relays with the opportunity to improve system performance, reliability or capacity. Adopting the latest gen-eration of intelligent power and protection relays broadens the scope for introducing im-proved monitoring, predictive protection and circuit control to systems.

Modern microprocessor relays also afford the possibility for advanced communications, poll-ing of data and hence, greater alarm and shut down options. For example, for Distribution Network Operators (DNOs) in an environment where Customer Minutes Lost (CML) and Cus-tomer Interruptions (CI) prove often to be im-provement drivers, the need to better maintain continuous supplies is vital. For Smart Grid to become a reality, it is likely that every substa-tion will, before anything else is possible, have to be fitted with modern communicating elec-tronic protection relays.

Equally in industry, the oil and gas sector, foods and pharmaceuticals, outage and lost production time is extremely costly. P&B Re-lays is seeing large retrofit programmes – ei-ther because existing protection equipment is too old – or to maximise production output potential.

P&B’s Phil York comments, “We would nor-mally expect business to dip in any economic downturn, but in fact, so many of our custom-ers can no longer put off investing in new de-vices that we are in fact seeing ever greater uptake of protection relays for retrofit projects in particular”. He concluded, “it undoubtedly helps that our latest devices are significantly less expensive than previous models, but that still doesn’t explain away the demand”.

P&B Switchgear has designed a new circuit breaker that can be fitted ex-tremely quickly to extend switchgear

life by up to 30 years. Because the unit comes as a complete assembly, there is no need to power down a system for upgrade until the very last moment. Once the new switchgear is connected in place, power can be restored immediately minimising downtime.

Called the vacuum circuit breaker retrofit Type VOR-M, the unit uses the latest resin embed-ded interrupters for dielectric performance and protection against shock, humidity and dust. For the highest reliability possible, the

number of moving parts in the unit has been minimised by adopting a magnetic actuator drive. This is capable of many thousands of entirely maintenance free operations.

Being a retrofit solution, it could be imagined that only certain parts are replaced, but in the case of the VOR-M, a completely new circuit breaker is supplied including the primary and secondary contacts and bushings.

Apart from increased safety and reliability, other benefits include enhanced short circuit

VROOM VROOM VOR-MBy Tony Harris

Managing Director P&B Switchgear

Check your switchgear

There is no legal requirement to replace aged oil filled switchgear with modern vac-uum types. The fact is that most switchgear, of any age, if properly maintained is both safe and reliable. Finally, oil filled switch-gear has been with us a long time and has proven to work well. In which case why does there remain an imperative to upgrade oil filled equipment? There are safety, reliability and cost considerations that belie the above statements, as Tony Harris explains in a technical feature article in Electrical Review magazine recently.

Safety, reliability or costs in any combination provide a real incentive to evaluate existing switchgear in any application. In spite of the fact there is no legal requirement to mod-ernise existing aged installations, the Health and Safety Executive, the British Standards Institute and the Institution of Engineering and Technology have all published documents re-lating to safety. By the same token, major us-ers of switchgear, such as the UK’s Network Distribution Operators and the power genera-tion industry have also highlighted the need to modernise because of the mission critical nature of their applications. Finally the rising costs of maintenance and the often punitive penalties for system failure have added a sig-nificant motivation for renewal.

A technical article about the costs and practicalities of replacing switchgear can be found on our web-site: www.pbsigroup.com

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ratings, reduced maintenance, elimination of hazardous materials (such as asbestos) and dramatically increased service life. Retrofit breakers also offer significant cost savings over replacement of switchboards, along with minimal disruption and the elimination of the need to disrupt or replace high voltage cables.Rated current is 630 to 1250A with a short circuit breaking current of up to 25kA rms and peak making current of 62.5kAp at 12kV. Mechanical life is >10,000 operations.

Tony Harris said: “In tough economic circum-stances there never the less remains an im-petus to improve system safety, reliability and uptime. Switchgear systems – the core of any electrical distribution - can be inexpensively upgraded to state of the art condition”.

Routine maintenance of overhead distribution power lines is literally an everyday occurrence for National Grid and Distribution Network Operators. The engineers that perform hazardous power line tasks high from the ground, must have isolation

safety foremost in their minds argues Geraint Evans of P&B Weir.

Even when isolated, induced currents in over-head power cables still present significant risks to engineers working on the lines. For example, on a steel transmission line tower carrying two circuits, typically only one set of three phases would be isolated before main-tenance work commences whilst the adja-cent three phase cables remain live. If the isolated lines are not worked on immediately, the magnetic flux (electromagnetic field) em-anating from the live conductors will induce current in the isolated lines.

These isolated lines then effectively act as a capacitor and, in theory at least, can store sufficient charge to allow up to 900A of cur-rent to flow along a low resistance path to earth (remember 200mA is deemed to be potentially fatal). A measure in practice, al-though this is not recommended, is that en-gineers using properly earth bonded clamps have been able to draw a continuous arc a metre in length from an apparently isolated line. This visually demonstrates the potential danger!

The optimum solution to the problem is to have fixed earthing equipment in place, but this is neither practical nor affordable in the overwhelming majority of cases.

There are a number of vital considerations in achieving totally safe maintenance measures on overhead power lines. The equipment must work reliably – including highly conduc-tive clamps that are easily applied and which maintain the required clamping pressure, light weight and low mass because the equipment has to handled at height. Insulated poles that are of high electrical resistance, strong and extremely lightweight to be able to be used safely. These poles are sometimes referred to as hot sticks – especially when deployed in live conductor operations.

While to most engineers, the protection equipment deployed in overhead cable main-tenance looks basic in both its function and construction, the design and application of the equipment makes a huge impact on the operator’s comfort and safety.

Clamps are the critical interface between the portable earthing equipment and the conductor. However, it is in the application of the clamp that both mass and the clamps operation have a great bearing on both the reliability of the connection and the safety of the operator fixing the clamp.

For this reason the latest clamps are made from lightweight aluminium alloy, with robust high-grade stainless steel fittings in contrast with the more typical copper based standards. The is that the equipment is half the weight of an equivalent capacity copper product with no degradation in performance. Similarly, alu-minium is employed for the earth lead con-necting the conductor ‘line end’ clamp and the ground ‘earth end’ clamp. Most weight of a typical portable earthing system is within this lead and for a typical 8 m long lead to protect from a 7kA/1 second (5kA/2 second) fault, a copper lead would weigh almost 4 kg rather than 1.5 kg for aluminium. On an earthing scheme involving a large number of earths, the weight saving of the aluminium product would result in a considerable reduc-tion in lost time due to physical strain.

The correct termination of the lead and its connection to the clamps also plays its role in improving the effectiveness of the earth-ing equipment by reducing the electrical contact resistance. A factory applied and as-sembled termination helps ensure an oxide free, moisture controlled joint, enhancing product quality.

The operating poles are also important and it is no surprise that the exceptional electrical resistive property of glass fibre is used exten-sively in modern equipment. However, it is not only the electrical property that is important. The materials used are carefully selected and tested to ensure the longitudinal and lateral strength required. Poles can be spigot jointed or telescopic, silicone coated or foam filled and ideally should incorporate a handgrip – essential in bad weather to ensure the opera-tor’s grip does not slip.

By Geraint Evans

A line on overhead safety

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A new range of protection relays has been launched by P&B that delivers sophisti-

cated control at a lower than ever price.

The MPR3000, MPC3000 and Vision3000 are the new models which replace the widely used former MPR2000 and MPC2000(D) re-lays. The new relays deploy technology from P&B’s sophisticated ‘Vision’ relay range. The result is cost effective and versatile protec-tion relays for both low and medium voltage switchgear.

Integral to the new design is a graphical LCD display. This allows for an intuitive menu structure with clear messaging and a display that charts and records the energising cur-rent during a motor start.

The 3000 range is directly pin for pin compat-ible with the previous 2000 relay hardware so direct replacement is simple, economic and immediate. The existing lid mounted re-set push button will align with the new relay and also act as a metered data scroll prompt. Using proven technology from P&B’s Vision relays, means the new 3000 not only shares design strengths and pedigree but is also benefits from the same state of the art pro-duction and testing processes. This allows the

New low price relays are powerful but easy to use

user to instantly inherit all of the new features and improvements of a modern P&B relay. One of the core design features is a modular pcb layout that lends itself to the shortened withdrawable case format as well as improv-ing future serviceability of the relay.

To simplify the variety of device options, the 3000 RTD inputs have been fixed as standard to five inputs. The digital inputs are wide ranging and auto-sensing. The PSU can either be ranged for operation at 80-265V AC or DC or an LV type can be fitted for voltages between 18-65V AC / DC. As with the 2000, the secondary CT connection rating should be specified as either 1A or 5A.

In addition, the 3000 relay hardware consists of: four programmable output relays with changeover contacts; five fixed digital inputs (on the MPR3000) or 19 fixed digital inputs (on the MPC3000 and Vision3000); five push buttons to navigate the menu driven LCD screen; nine colour LEDs for indication and status; a front mounted RS232 port and a rear mounted RS485 port for Modbus RTU or P&B Protocol.

P&B Engineering’s well established MPR2000 and MPC2000D relays are now replaced using technology from the highly sophisticated ‘Vision’ relay range. Offering cost effective, and versatile protection relays for both low and medium volt-age switchgear.

The new MPR3000 and MPC3000 relays underpin our commitment to provide modern relaying solutions for older equipment.

Integral to the new design is the graphical LCD dis-play which replaces the two line LCD of the older product. This allows for an intuitive menu structure with clear messaging and will display the energising current during a motor start.

The 3000 relay hardware consists of:4x Output Relays with Changeover Contacts5x Fixed Digital Inputs MPR3000 or19x Fixed Digital Inputs MPC30005x Push Buttons for Navigable Menu Driven LCD Screen

9x Coloured LEDs for Indication and Status1x Front Mounted RS232 Port1x Rear Mounted RS485 Port for Modbus RTU or P&B Protocol

4x 1A or 5A CT Inputs3x VT Inputs5x RTD Inputs1x Wide Ranging Power Supply 80-265V AC/DC or Low Voltage version

3D Model of theMPR3000 Relay Module

Designing the 3000 to be pin for pin compatible with the 2000 hardware means that any direct replacement is

exceptionally straightforward. The lid mounted reset push button will align with the new relay and also act as a

display scroll prompt allowing metered motor data to be viewed more easily than before.Porting the proven technology from Vision allows the new 3000 to conveniently inherit the designs strengths,

experiences and pedigree and also benefit from the same production and testing procedures and techniques.

Core to the Vision design is the modular philosophy of pcb layout which lends itself very well to the shortened

withdrawable case format.

Borrowing one of the main strengths from Vision, the LCD interface, the 3000 relay will be familiar to existing

Vision relay users as well as those more familiar with the 9 button, two line display and status LEDs of the 2000.

In order to simplify and reduce the amount of device options, for both the MPR3000 and MPC3000 the RTD

inputs have been fixed as standard to 5 inputs. The digital inputs are wide ranging and auto-sensing. The PSU

can either be ranged for operation at 80-265V AC or DC or an LV type can be fitted for voltages between 18-65V

AC / DC. As with the 2000, the secondary CT connection rating should be noted during order as either 1A or 5A.

Pin for Pin EquivalenceIdentical DimensionsCan Utilise Existing CaseNo Wiring Changes

Familiar LED IndicationsIntuitive Graphical MenuModern Relay TechnologyFront RS232 PortSmart Card Setting Transfer

MPR2000 / MPC2000D

MPR3000 / MPC3000

MPR/MPC3000 Protection Relay replacement for the MPR2000/MPC2000D

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Driven by the concerns from Government over the teaching of Science, Technol-

ogy, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) schools and colleges are increasingly looking to create comprehensive physics laboratories capable of delivering facilities suitable for GCSE, A-level and higher education. These educational establishments can fully equip a laboratory with instruments from P&B Weir. The company has been the major supplier of advanced, robust, yet simple to use instru-ments for educational settings for decades.

Weir instruments are built to be understood by students, safe and robust enough to withstand years of classroom use. Bench mounted or free standing, there are teacher demonstration mod-els available.

The range of e qu i p m e n t and instru-ments is e x t e n s i v e , from simple a m m e te r s , voltmeters, Wattmeters and galvanometers to moving coil and digital meters and a mavometer with seven DC ranges and six AC ranges.

Geraint Evans, managing director of P&B Weir explains, “our instruments are not the cheapest in the market, but they are exceptionally well made and extremely rugged”. He added, “I am not suggesting students are less then gentle with such equipment, but we have seen count-less examples where cheap instruments require replacement after just a couple of years”. He concluded, “schools, academies and colleges are charged with delivering best value and our products fulfil that requirement entirely”.

Instruments are an investment in the future

While operator safety and system in-tegrity are central to the design of

P&B Switchgear’s new Hawkvac 15 MV metalclad vacuum switchgear, the most obvious difference between this and alter-native panels, of similar current rating, is the remarkably small size of the unit.

Rated for indoor use, the Hawkvac 15 is ideal for distribution networks of electrical utilities as well as commercial and industrial areas, including the challenging environments of the oil, gas and petrochemical sectors.

In spite of deploying just a 600mm panel width, the Hawkvac 15 can handle ratings up to 2000A (40kA). The metalclad, mutli-compartmentalised, housing permits authorised work in safe areas while preventing all possible access to live equipment. For installation, both top and bottom cable access has been provided. Internal arc protection is to IEC62271-200. The circuit breaker, fully rated integral earth switch and complete fixed and moving portion assembly are all short circuit tested and certificated to British and International standards.

Small unitbig performer

PBSI Group Limted, Belle Vue Works, Boundary Street, Manchester, M12 5NG T: 0044 (0) 161 223 5151