Prima Ltd is the leading wheat flour manufacturing company from Singapore. The company started operating the first flour mill in Southeast Asia in 1961. The plant located at Keppel Terminal industrial estate Singapore continues to operate in modern time, supplying flour product to various food industry in the region. Milling machinery requires stable supply of electricity to keep its product quality consistent. However, the operation of electric mill machines places considerable demand on reactive power and causes fluctuation in power factor. The operator is unable to run multiple milling machines at maximum load simultaneously. This has caused a bottleneck in production yield and limit the volume of flour the factory can produce during peak time.

Conventional capacitor bank is unable to solve this problem due to the rapidly changing load condition.

Mun Hean Power Quality Team performed a datalog study at the mill 800A motor control board and noticed the large fluctuation in power factor, dipping to 0.65 during heavy load operation. The required power factor target set by the Electric Utility is to be higher than 0.85.

A Sinexcel SVG with 300kVAr capacity is installed at the MCC. SVG “Static VAr Generator” is a reactive power technology based on IGBT solid-state technology. The SVG operates with near realtime compensation of reactive power and brings the power factor to near unity 0.99 level. Exact amount of reactive power is generated by the SVG based on live measurement of the load condition. This is achieved without under or over compensation. There are no moving contactor parts in SVG which improve its reliability. Prima Flour Mill is now able to operate its milling machines at maximum load without the restrain of poor power factor.