One of our customers, Tri-Sen Systems (originally Triconex), is well known in the turbine control industry and manufactures a range of electronic control devices for monitoring and maintaining the speed of industrial steam turbines and for safe shutdown of these turbines under fault conditions. The electronics for one of their products, the 310SV, were designed by Indus Instruments in 2001 and were manufactured by Grayhill of Chicago until recently. Indus started manufacturing the 310SV in 2010 and now supplies the complete assembled and tested product (electronics, enclosure and power supplies) to Tri-Sen.

While the 310SV is ideally suited for controlling large turbines, there are no cost-effective electronic speed control solutions for small turbines which typically rely on old fashioned mechanical governors. These governors are imprecise and need periodic overhauling and adjustment. Small turbines are usually located in areas where it would be difficult to run electrical supply power to operate speed control electronics.

Tri-Sen came to us with a design challenge: develop a cost-effective, very compact electronic module in a rugged enclosure that uses very little power to run the electronics so that the energy harvested from the magnetic speed pickup mounted on the turbine is sufficient for so called “self-powered” operation. The end result of our efforts is the TS300, which can be mounted in a rugged industry standard hockey-puck enclosure and gets both speed information and operational energy from a single magnetic pickup.