CE+T is launching its new range under the name of Twin Sine Inverter (TSI) and using the slogan “A Revolution in Power”, which is simultaneously provoking, ambitious, and realistic. It is also a translation of a desire to maintain the lead on a very competitive market which has not escaped pressure from producers in the emerging countries.
Electricity transports very well as alternating current. This is why industrial and private applications are all based on a plug-in connection or an electric board.
On the other hand alternating current (AC) is difficult to store. Even today, batteries are still the only truly economical way of storing electric current. This is why cars contain a battery and the entire electrical circuit on the vehicle operates on direct current (DC). Since the early days of telephony direct current has been preferred for the same reasons. The legal requirement to maintain the telephone line to a building even during a power cut has resulted in operators building their networks on the basis of DC. Nevertheless some secondary operations can only take place in AC: accounting systems, lighting, air conditioning,… This is why there is a fast-growing need to connect to stable and uninterruptible sources of AC.
At the beginning of the ‘90s, CE+T was the first to introduce onto the market fault-tolerant AC sources based on the redundancy principle. The modular inverter had come into being.
Unfortunately after almost twenty years in effective use and with spectacular results, this solution still had certain weak points. In practice, many installations are equipped with static switches, sometimes for reasons that are technically justifiable, and sometimes less so, but the habit dies hard. A single point of failure for the power, a bottleneck, in the event of failure, it is the critical AC load that ceases, in most cases causing a service outage, along with all the damaging consequences described above (see diagram opposite).
Among other innovations, the TSI concept makes it possible to remove this obligatory Single Point of Failure and to use a fully and perfectly redundant architecture.
The improvement in terms of reliability and continuity of service is considerable, and there are other benefits too.
• Because it is fully modular, inverters can be added in parallel to an almost infinite degree. So users can modulate their power in accordance with needs, starting off with a low level of power, and increasing the installation according to need;
• The cabling is very much simpler;
• Power density has been greatly increased, so that it can be pushed to the limits of possibility, given the security standards in force and the inherent physical limitations;
• Thanks to the latest generation microprocessor command electronics, the installation requires neither special skills nor any special precautions;
• The energy taken from the electricity network is only of active type (see “the electrical context ” above);
• Equipped with the latest communications standards such as “Bluetooth”, “Can Bus” and “TCP-IP”, the TSI has also been designed to communicate with the majority of controllers and monitoring devices currently in use in the industry.
• With two sources of power, the electricity network and a battery (or fuel cell or solar panel) it can transfer the load from one to the other, with no interruption, and no disturbance to the supply whatsoever.
CE+T has called in industrial designers to ensure that equipment is of a very advanced aesthetic design, and also to improve the ergonomics of the product. The result is surprising. The choice of the extremely attractive colour of red has captivated everyone who has seen it so far. In itself this is a revolution in a very sombre, minimalist environment, which gives preference to technology and is dominated by neutral and sombre colours.
By making the choice for change, CE+T is pointing the way ahead and is playing its role as leader to the full.
Protected by patents, the TSI is designed to anticipate the needs of the market and to build a platform enabling many other variations and developments in the future.