VFDs designed for the chemical industry

Chemical production demands uncompromising reliability, precision, and efficiency. Danfoss VFDs and power converters are engineered for the most challenging environments, providing precise control, improved process performance, and significant energy efficiency gains across critical applications. Whether managing corrosive substances or in hazardous locations, our solutions support safer operations, lower costs, and sustained uptime. 

Enhanced precision and efficiency in pumping applications

Danfoss VFDs offer significant advantages in pumping applications within the chemical processing industry, delivering precise control of the speed of the pump motor. VFDs ensure that the chemical pump only operates as fast as needed to meet the current demand. This eliminates energy waste and leads to substantial energy savings. Smooth start and stop functionality reduces mechanical stress on the pump and piping system, minimizing wear and tear – extending the lifetime of the components. The precise flow control also helps to prevent issues like water hammer and leakage detection, ensuring a more stable and reliable process.

Significant energy savings in air handling

In chemical plants, industrial fans are crucial for ventilation, cooling, and process air systems. Often, these fans run at a constant speed, with dampers used to regulate airflow. Danfoss VFDs address this by adjusting the fan speed to match the exact ventilation requirements of the process. Ultimately, even a small reduction in fan speed can result in significant energy savings. This not only lowers operational costs but also reduces audible noise and minimizes mechanical stress on the fan, leading to lower maintenance costs and a more comfortable working environment. In the same way, VFDs reduce energy costs for other VFD for fan applications such as process dryers, and industrial blowers.

Optimized compressor performance and energy consumption

Compressed air and gas is a vital utility in chemical processing, but it is also one of the most energy intensive. Danfoss VFDs optimize compressor performance by matching the compressor's output to the real-time demand for compressed air and gas. This avoids the inefficient practice of running the compressor at full speed and then venting excess air or running in an unloaded state. By maintaining a stable system pressure and eliminating energy-wasting cycles, Danfoss VFDs can dramatically reduce the energy consumption of compressed air and gas systems, for industrial compressors and centrifugal compressors. This leads to lower electricity bills and a more reliable supply of compressed air and gas for critical process applications. 

Engineered for the toughest environments

Danfoss drives are built to thrive in extreme conditions. The high protection class and conformal coating of printed circuit boards in our AC drives enhance protection against environmental pollution, aggressive gases, moisture and dust. With a robust design and advanced cooling technology, our solutions ensure a long, trouble-free lifetime for your equipment. Key features include:

• Intelligent heat management: Unique back-channel cooling technology integrated into our higher-power drives can reduce ventilation requirements by up to 90%. This cooling innovation allows for smaller, less expensive air-conditioning systems and significantly lowers operational costs.
• Harsh environment protection: Coated electronics and advanced internal cooling systems protect sensitive components from contaminants, ensuring high reliability even in dusty and corrosive atmospheres. Ingress protection ratings of IP55 and IP66 allow flexibility of installation, including decentral mounting closer to the motor. Our drives are designed to operate flawlessly in ambient temperatures up to 50°C without de-rating. 

Reduce project costs and simplify installation

The compact, space-saving design of Danfoss drives offers significant advantages for both new projects and retrofits.

• Long motor cable capability: Operate reliably with motor cable lengths of up to 300 meters without requiring additional output filters. This standard feature saves space, reduces installation time, and lowers overall project costs 
• To extend unshielded cable length even further, couple with Danfoss sine-in sine-out filters
• Built-in ATEX compliance to operate Ex-motors in hazardous areas: ATEX Zone 1 and ATEX Zone 2 (gas), as well as ATEX Zone 21+22 (dust) -  with no need for additional external temperature monitoring devices or contactors. This solution eliminates costs for additional equipment and installation.
• Compact footprint: The high power density of VFDs from Danfoss ensures the market’s most compact design, which minimizes switch room footprint and simplifies layout. In turn, this helps to reduce building size, air-conditioning requirements, installation effort, and total project investment: both in construction and operating costs. 

In energy-intensive sectors like chemical production and refineries, reducing your carbon footprint is key to sustainable growth. Danfoss provides powerful solutions to improve energy efficiency, lower operational costs, and help you achieve your chemical industry sustainability goals.

Our market-leading energy efficient drive systems cut energy use by precisely matching motor speed to load demand. As the first to achieve the highest drive efficiency class (IE2), we minimize energy waste. For deeper decarbonization, our regenerative braking VFD technology captures braking energy from applications like centrifuges, decanters and separators and returns it as clean power. This is a crucial step for chemical sector decarbonization. 
Danfoss drives are engineered for sustained efficiency and reliability in the toughest conditions at the highest ambient temperatures. Back-channel cooling reduces switch room air conditioning costs by removing up to 90% of drive heat loss, lowering both CapEx and OpEx.

Danfoss drives are designed for the highest ambient and high-altitude operation without derating, ensuring a long, reliable service life. 

In chemical, refining and pharma, unplanned downtime hurts profitability. Digitalize your operations by transforming your Danfoss drives into smart sensors for your most critical equipment. 

By using the drive for condition monitoring, you get real-time health data from your motors and applications. This data is the key to enabling effective predictive maintenance in industry, allowing you to fix developing issues long before they cause a failure. This proactive strategy prevents costly shutdowns, reduces maintenance expenses, and extends the lifetime of your assets. 

Furthermore, the remote condition monitoring of industrial drives allows your team, or Danfoss experts, to securely access operational data from anywhere. This provides fast troubleshooting and expert analysis without the cost and delay of a site visit. 

Unlock the data already stored in your drives to build a more reliable, resilient, and profitable operation. 

While VFDs are essential in chemical, refining and pharmaceutical industries, like any non-linear load they can create harmonic distortion. This is a form of electrical pollution that can negatively affect other equipment and causes costly downtime.

Danfoss offers a complete portfolio of solutions to clean up your power grid, protect your assets, and ensure operational stability.

Solutions for every level of harmonic distortion mitigation:

• Built-in harmonic mitigation: All industrial frequency converters from Danfoss are equipped as standard with integrated DC chokes, which significantly reduce harmonics at the source and protect your power grid without the need for additional components. 
• Low harmonic VFDs: For stricter requirements, our dedicated low harmonic drives use active technology to guarantee less than 5% THDi, ensuring compliance with global standards like IEEE 519.
• Active harmonic filter: For maximum flexibility, a Danfoss active harmonic filter provides centralized correction for an entire facility or switch room. It dynamically cancels harmonics from any source, ensuring clean power for all connected equipment.
• Passive harmonic filter: For harmonic mitigation of one drive or a group of drives. This program offers 2 versions, for THDi system levels of 10% and 5% or better, respectively. This passive harmonic solution provides the best possible energy efficiency in part-load application, outperforming most active front-end (AFE)-based solutions.

By implementing the right harmonic mitigation strategy, you protect your critical assets, ensure grid compliance, and maximize uptime. Use MyDrive® Harmonics free of charge tool to determine the impact of harmonics on your system. Calculate system harmonic distortion and estimate the benefits of all harmonic mitigation solutions from Danfoss. 

The terms VFD (variable frequency drive) and VSD (variable speed drive) are often used interchangeably. Both refer to a device that controls the speed and torque of an electric motor by adjusting the power supplied to it. VFD is the more technically accurate term, as the drive specifically varies the frequency to control the motor’s speed. Danfoss specializes in high-performance VFDs for industrial applications.

Read more about VFDs

VFDs are fundamental to improving chemical processing efficiency in several key ways. They provide:

• Optimized process control: By enabling precise speed control of equipment like pumps, fans, extruders, mixers, compressors, etc., you can perfectly match throughput to process requirements. This eliminates bottlenecks, improves final product quality, and maximizes output. 
• Significant energy savings: VFDs drastically cut energy consumption by ensuring motors only run at the speed required for the load, especially on pumps and fans. This directly lowers operational costs, a major component of overall efficiency.
• Increased equipment uptime: Smooth starting and stopping reduces mechanical stress on motors, gears, couplings, and load. This extends equipment life and, crucially, reduces unplanned downtime from mechanical failures.
• Predictive maintenance: Modern drives act as intelligent sensors, monitoring equipment health. This enables a proactive maintenance strategy to fix issues before they cause a costly shutdown, further boosting operational efficiency. 

The benefits of a VFD for mine ventilation are significant. Firstly, they provide massive energy savings by allowing you to control fan speed based on real-time demand (ventilation on demand or VOD), so you only use the power needed. This drastically cuts operational costs. Secondly, they improve safety by ensuring reliable and controlled airflow. Finally, by enabling smooth starts and stops, VFDs reduce mechanical stress on fan motors and drivetrains, which lowers maintenance costs and extends equipment life.

The benefits of a VFD for chemical, refining and pharmaceutical plants are significant. For your plant to run at its absolute best, you need drives that enable peak performance. Designed with decades of industry know-how, our AC drives deliver best-in-class reliability and robustness. Their leading energy efficiency lowers your total cost of ownership and reduces carbon footprint to help in reaching the world’s climate goals. Further, predictive and condition-based monitoring are built into our drives to give you the intelligence you need to future-proof your systems. Built-in cybersecurity ensures you comply with existing and upcoming regulations. Our drives are also fully compatible with any motor or system, so you’re free to run the optimal system for your plant. Choose Danfoss as your AC drives partner and you can rely on us to keep you going.

Our drives are available in a wide range of enclosure ratings to suit any environment, including IP00, IP20, IP21, IP54, IP55, and IP66, depending on the enclosure size and power rating of the drive. 

Yes. Our drives are engineered for harsh environments. We offer ratings up to IP66 / NEMA 4X, which are dust-tight and protected against high-power water jets, making them ideal for installation in processing plants or even outdoors with a simple weather shield. For higher power needs, we offer robust IP54 solutions.

Yes, with an additional option card Danfoss drives can operate explosion protected motors in zone 1 and 2 (gas) and zone 21 and 22 (dust). Zone 0 and zone 20 are not applicable to electrical motors and therefore no motor installation in those zones is permitted. According to ATEX Directive 2014/34/EU and Standard EN 60079-14, motor overload protection is a requirement. The optional ATEX option board monitors the temperature in the motor windings with an ATEX-approved motor overload protection device. In case of a critical motor temperature level or a malfunction, the drive switches off the motor using STO (Safe Torque Off) function of the drive. Alternatively, an external ATEX-approved PTC protection device can be used. See ATEX EU-Type examination certificates for the different drive series and always refer to the motor manufacturer instructions. 

Our drives are designed for reliable operation in ambient temperatures from –25°C to +50°C (–13°F to 122°F). They can operate at a maximum altitude of 1,000 meters (3,280 ft) without derating and can be used at up to 4,400 meters (14,435 ft) with derating. 

For drives above 90 kW, we offer a unique back-channel cooling design as a standard feature. This heat management technology removes up to 90% of the heat directly from the drive’s power components, significantly reducing the heat load. This often eliminates the need for expensive, energy-intensive air conditioning systems, lowering both CAPEX and OPEX. 

We currently support a broad range of voltage ratings from 200 V to 690 V to meet global industrial requirements. 

Yes, we have a comprehensive portfolio to ensure high power quality. Our solutions include ultra low-harmonic (ULH) drives, enclosed low harmonic drives, and both passive and active harmonic filter systems.

Learn about cost-effective harmonic mitigation

A key benefit of our drives is their ability to operate with long motor cables without needing additional output filters. Depending on the product, they support shielded cable lengths up to 300 meters (typically 150 meters), saving cost and space in the cabinet. 

Danfoss drives are supplied with integral RFI (radio frequency interference) filters as a standard feature for all EMC categories, which must be confirmed at the time of order. This ensures reliable operation of all other electrical equipment on the same installation without needing extra filters. 

With the additional NAMUR option it is possible to realize an I/O-interface according to NAMUR NE37 and NE189. For fieldbus communication Danfoss drives support VIK-NAMUR protocol according to ST20 telegram. 

Our drives feature Automatic Motor Adaptation (AMA), a powerful algorithm that measures the motor’s electrical characteristics and optimizes the drive’s control parameters accordingly. This process takes only a few seconds, does not require spinning the motor, and ensures the highest control accuracy and operating efficiency for induction, permanent magnet (PM), or synchronous reluctance (SynRM) motors.

We support all major industrial communication protocols, including but not limited to PROFIBUS, PROFINET, MODBUS, EtherNet/IP, EtherCAT, POWERLINK, DeviceNet, CANopen, and OPC UA for seamless integration into your control system.

You have two easy options. You can use our PC software tools to download the parameter set and upload it to another drive, or you can upload the settings directly to the drive’s Local Control Panel (LCP), remove the panel, and plug it into another drive to download the configuration. 

Our drives are designed for a long service life with minimal maintenance. For most frame sizes, the primary requirement is periodic cleaning of cooling fans to ensure optimal airflow. A DrivePro® service agreement will ensure a predictable maintenance budget and optimal reliability of your systems for many years to come

The model code (or type code) is a unique string of characters that defines the specific configuration of your drive. You can enter this code into the online configurator on our website for a full overview of its features, or refer to the product instruction manual. 

As a pioneer in VFDs, Danfoss is your industrial drive specialist and expert partner for industrial drive solutions. We engineer drives that deliver unmatched reliability and efficiency in the harshest conditions.

Our high-ingress IP66 enclosures enable decentralized automation solutions without costly cabinets, while a rugged design ensures reliable repositioning. We simplify installation with long motor cable support and boost your efficiency with unique back-channel cooling and regenerative drives that cut energy costs and support decarbonization. With high overload capability and integral condition-based monitoring, we ensure you maximize production and uptime.

Choose Danfoss to lower your total cost of ownership and drive your business forward. 

What’s special about drives from Danfoss?