Utilization of Common DC Systems for Petrochemical Applications

For more than four decades, Adjustable Speed Drives (ASDs) have been used in petrochemical and other industrial applications. Many papers have been written about various applications and issues related to ASDs. This article will expand on previous papers and will look more specifically at the design considerations for low voltage (LV) high horsepower ASDs that reside on a common dc bus, expanding on application considerations for creating a large dc bus and the effects on the rest of the power system. This article will include a case study of a particular application having a diesel generator supplying an islanded network feeding multiple rectifiers with a common dc bus that spanned several hundred feet.