Finding cost-efficient alternatives
Balancing all of the inductive components’ properties in a single application isn’t easy.
Ensuring that everything fits together, isn’t too hot to function properly, and maintains a high technical fidelity and quality, all the while keeping the price from sky-rocketing, is just a little harder than it sounds. But to take that design and find ways to make it more cost-effective requires a whole lot of technical expertise that comes only with years of industry experience.
Yet our skilled team of engineers routinely help our clients find ways to cut costs.
Just like the time we found a way to save 4% on a DC link choke.
A new client of ours came to us to help them redesign their DC link choke with the goal of reducing costs without sacrificing performance whatsoever.
When the project arrived in front of our engineers, they quickly zeroed in on the grain-oriented lamination. Producing grain-oriented electrical steel is more expensive with large fluctuations in price than non-oriented steel. But it fares better when working in a restricted space.
However, space was not an issue for this particular application.
That’s why we designed a new DC link choke with a 20 mm taller stack height than the original. By using more space, we could downgrade the quality of the lamination to non-oriented, saving considerably in the process.
While we did increase the size and weight of the inductive component, holistically speaking, we didn’t make it so that the changes negatively affected other parts.
By doing so, we fulfilled the client’s goal of reducing the cost for their components, resulting in:
4% saved annually on 40,000 components 28,000€ saved each year
This is just one example of how tweaking a component’s properties to make it more cost-efficient can affect the grand picture.
Of course, the same optimisations are possible even if a client requires a cooler, smaller, or a more inductive component.
We’ve worked hard to become experts at walking the tight-rope of designing inductive components. And we’d be more than happy to help you optimise your inductive components to meet your specifications and standards.
Are you curious about how your inductor can be optimised? Then spend an hour in the company of our engineers, where we will look at how we can take your specification to the next level.