According to the German Environment Agency, electric drives in the industry and trade sectors consume nearly two fifths of the total electricity in Germany. Particularly electric drives and the aggregates powered by them therefore have a great and economic energy saving potential. With its highly efficient latest-generation IE5+ motors, system provider NORD DRIVESYSTEMS offers an optimum solution for the significant reduction of energy and resource consumptions.

The compact and highly efficient IE5+ permanent magnet synchronous motors (PMSM) from NORD are characterised by a constantly high efficiency of up to 95% over a wide torque range and thus also achieve optimum energy consumption performance in partial load and partial speed ranges. “That means that the efficiencies of our IE5+ motors clearly exceed those of the highest defined efficiency class IE5”, says Jörg Niermann, Marketing Manager at NORD DRIVESYSTEMS. This significantly reduces the application’s energy requirements and CO2e emissions. Particularly for large systems with long operating times of the electric drives – for example in intralogistics with many installed drives – this makes a considerable difference. “Our IE5+ motor technology, however, is far more than just energy efficiency”, Niermann adds. “We rather think of it as a holistic concept that goes beyond the mere consideration of efficiency.”

Material efficiency as a sustainability factor

The compact IE5+ permanent magnet synchronous motors from NORD also convince with their innovative design and require a comparatively small quantity of material. NORD designed the IE5+ motor as an 8-pole synchronous motor in an IPM design. This reduces the size of the motor’s active components, which not only results in material savings in the sheet metal package but also with the magnets.

With 8-pole synchronous motors, the stator can also be manufactured with the so-called single-tooth windings. As a result, valuable material such as copper is only used where it is actually productive; inefficient use in the winding head is reduced. “Our IE5+ synchronous motor combines energy efficiency with material efficiency and thus scores twice in terms of sustainability”, Niermann highlights. “This is also valid for our DuoDrive, which integrates the IE5+ motor with a single-stage helical gear unit into one housing.”

NORD as a system provider

With regard to the energy savings potential, the entire drive system including electric motor, gear unit and drive electronics must be taken into account. The highly efficient IE5+ motors can be combined with different components from the NORD modular system. This creates optimally matched and tailored system solutions from a single source. This allows to increase the total efficiency of machines and systems, and to reduce the Total Costs of Ownership (TCO). With the NORD ECO service, the drive experts from NORD also offer an effective tool to reveal savings potential in a system and to minimise the companies’ carbon footprint. “Finally, we want to enable the user to make the best possible use of the advantages of our drive systems”, Niermann summarises. “To make this work, we assist our customers from the design phase up to commissioning.”