Emerson Network Power, a business of Emerson (NYSE: EMR) and the world’s leading provider of critical infrastructure for information and communications technology systems, debuts a ground-up redesign of its ASCO® 4000  Series Generator Paralleling Switchgear that now offers high-end, custom capabilities in a mid-range system. Through innovative design, the new ASCO switchgear delivers more for less.

"It integrates our most sophisticated, field-proven controls, engineering and technology for performance-enhancing reliability at lower cost than previous designs," reports Tony Landi, director of engineering of ASCO Power Switching and Controls for Emerson Network Power.  An innovative approach tailors the system(s) to the customer-specific application during the ordering process, optimizing flexibility, and enabling sophisticated functionalities, short lead times and support.

The ground-up redesign features monitoring and control that is completely independent of the operator touch screen, and generator control is completely independent from the master controller. A backup, hard-wired generator control circuit separate from the master controller maximizes reliability.

Operators are provided with detailed diagnostics for overall monitoring of critical system components including digital power meters, digital gen-set controllers, programmable automation controllers, automatic transfer switches, and circuit breakers. By integrating power switching and control elements the system can alert operators at the local switchgear, or via optional remote color touch screen. 

The screens provide a powerful user-friendly interface that visualize information in easily understood formats using one-lines, charts, graphs and pictograms. Displays include gen-set status/control and trending, historical alarms, power transfer switch status, and a range of metering data. Ethernet and Modbus® mapping connectivity stream data to an ASCO Critical Power Management System, supervisory control and data acquisition systems, building management systems and data center infrastructure management systems.

The ASCO 4000 Switchgear provides 'refined' power management. When adding and shedding loads, it accounts for actual measured values of building loads on the main bus, rather than only considering online generator capacity.

Refined management, including generator load demand and load bus optimization, ensures when a load is added it will not be shed, except during overload conditions, even if a generator is shut down or unexpectedly taken offline. This maximizes load distribution and controls generator efficiency.

An optional ASCO 4000 Switchgear Simulator helps ensure operator proficiency through training, testing and performance-measuring exercises. For managing power outages and other serious events, there is no effective alternative to intelligent simulation because there are no second chances in mission-critical environments. The ASCO 4000 Switchgear Simulator incorporates the same color touch screen and  programmable logic controller as the power control system, rather than relying on computer modeling. This enables the simulator to execute actual sequence of events in a range of 'what if' scenarios.

See the ASCO 4000  Series Generator Paralleling Switchgear brochure, or call (800) 800 ASCO (2726), email CustomerCare@Asco.com, or visit EmersonNetworkPower.com/ASCO for more information.