The Customer
Spirax Sarco has been a world leader in seam and thermal energy solutions for more than 130 years. Their products help customers improve plant performance and achieve environmental goals with safe, sustainable and efficient energy. They are experts in the use of steam for heating or sterilizing almost any industrial process from food production to oil refining to drug manufacturing.
The Challenge
Spirax Sarco had incorporated a counter into a condensate pump system to detect the cycles of the pump by counting the number of times that tank filles up, but water turbulence in the tank caused the float switch to bounce leading to inaccurate readings. This caused faulty readings, leading the user to believe that the pumps were running more than they did.
The Solution
We created a custom version of our 7111 counter with a built-in de-bounce circuit that filtered out the switch bounce from the float switch. The added filter circuit in the 7111 resulted in each full tank registering exactly one count. This lets the user know exactly how many times the pump has operated.
The Benefits
- The end consumer can be confident in the number of times a pump has been activated.
- The end consumer can accurately forecast usage and plan maintenance schedules.
- Spirax Sarco can offer a 1 Million cycle guarantee because they have an accurate counter from Trumeter.
The Story
A dedicated project manager and engineering team worked in close collaboration with Spirax Sarco’s product engineer and product development team, from concept to manufacturing. We first developed two possible solutions to discuss with the customer: a hardware solution and a custom firmware solution. Both ensured that once the float switch was activated, further activations would be ignored for a few sections to provide enough time for water turbulence to settle.
We opted for the firmware solution and based the final solution on our standard 7111 counter. We increased the capacitance of the input circuit to dampen the contact bounce. The added filtering resulted in each full tank registering exactly one count.
At Trumeter, we are big on verification and validation. Since we couldn’t measure the exact conditions inside of the tank, we worked closely with them to create and test multiple samples of the custom counter.
