I am now working on a project for a water treatment plant, which the customer would like to use soft starters to control waste water pumps in order to take care of the water hammer problems.
There are about 200 units of 1kW motors used to pump waster water, which are located about 50m away one from the other.
The thing is, due to budget limitation, the customer could not afford to use 1 soft starter for each motor and would like to use, says 1 unit of 15kW soft starter to soft start and stop 15 unit motors. The time between each start is about 2 to 3 hours.
Does any one of you have any experience in this kind of parallel connection application with soft starter?
If this is workable, what is the maximum number of motors to be connect in parallel?
I am afraid if anything happen on 1 motor it will cause the rest of the motors fail as well, would this happen? If this might happen, then the whole world would point the finger at the soft starter before even start to verify the actual cause of failure.
Besides this, is there any other hidden risk, which you guys can foresee?
All comments are welcome!
Danke!
