GE Introduces Entellisys Low-Voltage Switchgear
Entellisysâ„¢ a new low-voltage switchgear solution (208-600 volts, 800-5,000 amperes) from GE Consumer & Industrial provides new operational safety features and newfound levels of advanced protection, lifetime system flexibility, greater reliability and major strides in ease of use.
"Entellisys is almost as easy to use as an ATM," says Jane Barber, Entellisys' product marketing manager. "The Entellisys interface is very intuitive and is a vast improvement over the many devices in traditional gear with cryptic interfaces."
Entellisys sets the stage for new best practices in such settings as oil and gas plants, healthcare facilities, airports, corporate data centers, manufacturing facilities, and water and wastewater treatment plants. For the first time, operators can perform virtually all control, monitoring and diagnostic work outside the arc-flash protection boundary using Entellisys' remote human-machine interface (HMI) options.
Entellisys' advanced protection options include the industry's first cost-effective implementation of bus differential (ANSI 87B) on low-voltage switchgear. Bus differential provides true zone-based protection and detects faults that range from less than the bus rating to the full short circuit rating of the equipment. Entellisys does this in minimum time, clearing faults faster; it is 100-percent selective all of the time.
Historically, bus differential has been used only on medium-voltage switchgear because of its complexity and related cost. Now, because Entellisys' central architecture uses minimal components and provides all non-mechanical functionality in software, specifying engineers are free to explore new possibilities for protection and control.
Entellisys is designed with a simple central architecture. Its few components and minimal wiring allow a fully redundant system to be installed. With Entellisys, there is no single point of failure for the system.
As facilities change, Entellisys can be easily upgraded without additional hardware or downtime. Mobile metering is just one example of Entellisys' flexibility. Users can purchase a single metering function and then move it to any circuit for any length of time. Unlike a traditional system, there are no wires to rout, CTs to add or holes to cut
"Entellisys is unique in its ability to provide all protection, control, monitoring, and diagnostics based on highly accurate information from each circuit, synchronized within microseconds across the system," notes Barber. "Essentially, it gives users real-time visibility into the power distribution network and the switchgear protecting it–with powerful backup protections and multiple redundancies."
