With its commitment to lowering their customers’ cost of ownership, Tri Tech Automation (Tri Tech), a developer of automated control systems, sought to reduce customer maintenance costs on their motor control centers (MCCs) installed at customers’ oil and gas pump stations. In addition

Typically, oil and gas drilling rigs use an ungrounded electrical system to allow for continuous operation during the first ground fault. However, this type of system has many disadvantages such as potential overvoltages and difficulty in locating ground faults. A large rig manufacturer experienced these issues and was looking for a way to eliminate these problems. After consultation, they chose a high-resistance grounding package that included a zig-zag transformer, neutral-grounding resistor and the SE-330, which continuously monitors the integrity of the grounding circuit. To help determine ground-fault location, SE-701 Ground-Fault Relays were installed on each feeder. After installatio

An energy company that was building an oil battery was concerned about arc-flash hazards, not only in terms of personnel safety but also to reduce the potential costs associated with damaged equipment and downtime. They installed PGR-8800 Arc-Flash Relays in the low-voltage MCCs and medium-voltage switchgear. Incorporating the arc-flash relay reduced the incident energy levels of many of the compartments by the equivalent of two PPE category levels, reducing the risk to employees and lowering the PPE rating.

Littelfuse protection relays are found throughout the expansive oil fields in North America. The MP8000 Bluetooth* Overload Relay is used in the pump panel to provide enhanced protection in place of a standard overload relay and voltage monitor. Customers prefer all the advanced protection in one unit, and the MP8000 delivers. The unique Bluetooth* capability also increases personnel safety by keeping people out of the panel. Technicians can easily make trip settings without opening the panel door—or even getting out of the truck.

One of the world’s largest producers of synthetic crude oil from oil sands requested assistance in developing a ground-check monitor for long cables. We were able to provide them with a highly reliable solution, the SE-135 Ground-Fault Ground-Check Monitor, to protect oil-sands mining shovels powered by 10 km long cables. This allowed them to optimize their mine plan and save millions of dollars by minimizing substation moves, which require expensive down time.

A 140,000 barrel-per-day refinery uses VFDs to operate cooling tower fans. The VFDs are high-resistance grounded in order to limit the ground-fault current to a safe level. They realized that the built-in ground-fault protection on the VFDs, which are often designed to trip at high levels of ground-fault current, was not sensitive enough to protect the VFD on a HRG system. EL731 ground-fault relays specifically designed for this application were installed to provide supplemental protection.

One of the longest oil pipelines in North America was experiencing grounding power-resistor failures. These resistors are used on the power source to limit destructive ground-fault currents. Compounding the issue, the pipeline crew wasn’t even aware of the resistor failures since they were not being monitored. Once the pipeline company became aware that they could continuously monitor the resistors using field-proven technology that Littelfuse pioneered over 20 years ago, they standardized on the SE-330 on resistor monitoring for all of their 5 kV pumping stations. A high-pressure natural gas pipeline company selected our MPU-32 Motor Protection Units to protect the motors in their compre