REO puts choke production on full throttle

In response to increasing demand for power quality equipment, specialist manufacturer Reo has invested substantially in two new fully automatic coil winding machines. Reo can now make its ranges of compensation chokes, DC link chokes and storage chokes at rates of up to 3600 an hour using the two new machines. The new plant enables the company to deliver an exceptionally fast response to requests from customers for both standard and special purpose EMC filters.

Growth in the market has been spurred by a number of factors. Firstly the European EMC Directive insists that electrical equipment must have electromagnetic filtering to avoid interference with other equipment. Secondly, the power quality issue has come into greater focus with the advent in the past two years of the G5/4 Recommendations on the generation of damaging harmonics onto the electricity supply. Thirdly, increasing numbers of manufacturers of variable speed AC drives (one of the “noisiest” industrial components) are incorporating intrinsic filters into their designs.

Lead times have been slashed, the capacity to handle bespoke designs has increased and costs have also been controlled. Each of the new machines is capable of making chokes with large numbers of windings and in dimensions up to 32mm diameter x 12mm high.

Reo’s UK MD, Mr John Symonds, said: “Chokes are proving to be extremely successful for us and we are particularly keen to partner drive manufacturers who wish to incorporate filter components in their inverter designs”. He then added, “Apart from these smaller, automatically produced chokes, we have a comprehensive range of others for smoothing, power factor correction, DC link, thyristor suppression, dV/dt reduction and inverter input/output reactors. One could say that this is a complete business in itself”.