Professional Electrical Apparatus Recyclers League

Last updated
Professional Electrical Apparatus Reconditioning League - PEARL
Founded1997
TypeProfessional Organization
FocusEnsuring the safety of recycled and reused electrical power equipment
Area served
Worldwide
MethodIndustry Standards, Conferences, Publications
Website www.PEARL1.org

The Professional Electrical Apparatus Reconditioning League or PEARL is an international professional organization and standards group based in Denver, Colorado. [1] PEARL is focused on developing ethical business practices and technical standards [2] related to inspecting, testing, and reconditioning circuit breakers, transformer, motor controls, switchgear, disconnect switches, protective relays, bus duct, motor starters and other electrical equipment and apparatus used in the electrical distribution systems of commercial, industrial, and utility facilities.

Transformer electrical device that transfers energy through electromagnetic induction

A transformer is a static electrical device that transfers electrical energy between two or more circuits. A varying current in one coil of the transformer produces a varying magnetic flux, which, in turn, induces a varying electromotive force across a second coil wound around the same core. Electrical energy can be transferred between the two coils, without a metallic connection between the two circuits. Faraday's law of induction discovered in 1831 described the induced voltage effect in any coil due to changing magnetic flux encircled by the coil.

Switchgear

In an electric power system, switchgear is composed of electrical disconnect switches, fuses or circuit breakers used to control, protect and isolate electrical equipment. Switchgear is used both to de-energize equipment to allow work to be done and to clear faults downstream. This type of equipment is directly linked to the reliability of the electricity supply.

Bus duct

In electrical power distribution, a bus duct, is a sheet metal duct containing either copper or aluminium busbars for the purpose of conducting a substantial current of electricity. It is an alternative means of conducting electricity to power cables or cable bus.

Contents

PEARL and Electrical Safety

PEARL's standards for inspecting, testing and reconditioning electrical equipment, components and apparatus help ensure the reliable, safe operation of devices such as circuit breakers, transformers, switches, protective relays, and contactors. PEARL also disseminates information on electrical safety news and counterfeit notices relating to electrical equipment utilized at commercial, industrial and utility facilities.

PEARL is an American National Standards Institute (ANSI) Developer of Reconditioning Standards

PEARL is an "American National Standards Institute (ANSI) Developer of Reconditioning Standards" for returning electrical equipment to safe and reliable service. PEARL's goal is to develop a single set of consensus technical standards for reconditioning electrical equipment used in industrial and commercial installations and accepted by a pool of industry professionals and stakeholders.

To this end, PEARL is seeking qualified individuals to review and provide input and comment on new standards and any revision to a standard. These individuals will have expertise and knowledge of inspecting, testing and reconditioning electrical equipment used in industrial and commercial facilities.

PEARL and Anti-Counterfeit Measures for Electrical Equipment

Counterfeit electrical apparatus pose a growing threat [3] to all sectors of the electrical marketplace, from the OEMs who lose revenue and brand prestige, to distributors and suppliers that risk liability, to electrical contractors end users who can face financial or physical liabilities as a result of potentially dangerous counterfeit electrical devices. Independent suppliers of electrical product are particularly susceptible to fraudulent counterfeit goods because most OEMs will not sell their 'new' product at wholesale prices directly to non-licensed distributors, forcing independent electrical supply houses to alternate sources.

In September 2007, PEARL held a special board meeting to discuss counterfeit electrical power equipment. [4] Among other actions, PEARL's Standards and Practices Committee issued a policy directive to all members to pro-actively assist OEMs and other organizations with identifying, reporting, and policing counterfeit electrical product and the companies and individuals that sell it. Since 2007, PEARL members have helped OEMs and other industry associations locate several shipments of counterfeit product.

PEARL sponsors an annual "Electrical Safety, Reliability and Sustainability Conference & Exhibition. Conference topics include but are not limited to:

PEARL and the Environment

In 2010 PEARL published a white paper "Reconditioning: The Ultimate Form of Recycling" outlining how reuse, reconditioning, and remanufacturing use a fraction of the energy of new production, keep millions of tons of waste from landfills every year, reduce raw material consumption, and create 3 to 5 times more skilled jobs than automated production lines.

Because the remanufacturing process only consumes about 15% of the energy used to create a new product, remanufacturing in the U.S. saves 400 trillion BTUs annually, the equivalent of 16 million barrels of crude oil, or enough gasoline to run 6 million cars for a year. Based on a weighted average of 140 pounds of CO
2
gas pollution for every 1 million BTUs of energy consumed, remanufacturing reduces CO
2
generation by 28 million tons each year, which is equal to the CO
2
output of 10, 500-megawatt coal-burning electrical plants. Remanufacturing also saves the U.S. enough raw materials to fill 155,000 railway cars each year. [5] [6]

Boston University's Prof. Robert Lund estimated the U.S. remanufacturing industry at $53 billion in sales in 1996, employing approximately 480,000 people. [7] This figure only includes a portion of the electrical equipment market related to electrical motors, and doesn't include remanufacturing of other electrical products such as circuit breakers, transformers, etc. Remanufacturing electrical equipment keeps thousands of tons of waste from U.S. landfills every year, based on the inventory turnarounds shown just by PEARL member companies. Also, unlike recycling which only reclaims part of the materials within a waste stream, reconditioning reclaims more material savings, as well as most of the energy and labor energy used to manufacturer the original product, making reconditioning a more environmentally sustainable practice than recycling. In 2003, the OEM Product-Services Institute (OPI) said U.S. electrical generation facilities alone spent $3.1 billion on remanufacturing, overhaul, and rebuilding. [8]

Between 1980 and 1992, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health estimated that on average 411 workers died in the U.S. each year from electrocution. [9] Safety of remanufactured electrical equipment is a prime focus of PEARL.

Although numbers on energy savings and pollution reduction thanks solely to electrical reconditioning do not exist, PEARL has recently been recognized by the California Integrated Waste Management Board (CIWMB) through its Waste Reduction Award Program (WRAP). [10] as an organization that has help the state meet its waste reduction goals.

History

PEARL's original corporate members first came together in Denver, CO, in 1996 to discuss emerging issues surrounding new electronic data interchange (EDI) systems for the ordering and purchase of electric apparatus and equipment for commercial and industrial markets. As a group, these independent suppliers of new, surplus, and used electrical apparatus and equipment for commercial and industrial electrical applications typically were neither members of horizontal electrical industry associations and standards organizations, such as the National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA), who develops general electrical enclosure and interconnect standards for electrical original equipment manufacturers (OEM); nor vertical trade associations such as the Electrical Apparatus Service Association Inc. (EASA), which develops standards for servicing electrical motors, nor the International Electrical Testing Association (NETA), which develops standards for electrical field testing and field equipment maintenance. EASA and NETA would go on to become standards development groups for the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).

Although OEMs of electrical equipment did develop maintenance and repair documents for their individual company products and offer for-fee remanufacturing services, neither OEM's nor their trade associations collected these repair documents, standardized the processes from different companies, validated the processes through third party engineering review, or offered them as a group of standards to the electrical industry at large. EASA had developed standards for rewinding electric motors, excluding motor control circuits, NETA had developed the standards to calibrate electrical test equipment used in both EASA and eventually PEARL standards, but in 1996, PEARL's founding members saw that the industry did not have the technical standards necessary to ensure the safety of reconditioned electrical equipment used by industrial and commercial industries, ranging from circuit breakers and transformer to conduit and bus duct.

As a result of these conditions within the electrical industry, In 1997, 20 charter members formed PEARL to collect, create, and disseminate information, policies, procedures, and standards to ensure the proper recycling and reuse of electrical power equipment, as well as to prevent fraudulent electrical apparatus labeling and misrepresentation of electrical equipment. As of May 25, 2009, PEARL's 51 corporate voting members and 30 affiliate members, representing more than $500 million in annual sales revenues from companies in the U.S. and Canada, have contributed to the development of 137 electrical Reconditioning Standards for Electrical Equipment ranging from circuit breakers and transformers to conduit and bus duct.

Related Research Articles

UL (safety organization)

UL LLC is a global safety certification company headquartered in Northbrook, Illinois. It maintains offices in 46 countries. Established in 1894 as the Underwriters' Electrical Bureau, it was known throughout the 20th century as Underwriters Laboratories and participated in the safety analysis of many of that century's new technologies.

Electrical substation part of an electrical generation, transmission, and/or distribution system

A substation is a part of an electrical generation, transmission, and distribution system. Substations transform voltage from high to low, or the reverse, or perform any of several other important functions. Between the generating station and consumer, electric power may flow through several substations at different voltage levels. A substation may include transformers to change voltage levels between high transmission voltages and lower distribution voltages, or at the interconnection of two different transmission voltages.

Power engineering subfield of electrical engineering, which deals with power generation, conversion, storage, transport and forwarding in electrical networks and use of electrical energy

Power engineering, also called power systems engineering, is a subfield of electrical engineering that deals with the generation, transmission, distribution and utilization of electric power, and the electrical apparatus connected to such systems. Although much of the field is concerned with the problems of three-phase AC power – the standard for large-scale power transmission and distribution across the modern world – a significant fraction of the field is concerned with the conversion between AC and DC power and the development of specialized power systems such as those used in aircraft or for electric railway networks. Power engineering draws the majority of its theoretical base from electrical engineering.

Fuse (electrical) type of low resistance resistor that acts as a sacrificial device to provide overcurrent protection, of either the load or source circuit

In electronics and electrical engineering, a fuse is an electrical safety device that operates to provide overcurrent protection of an electrical circuit. Its essential component is a metal wire or strip that melts when too much current flows through it, thereby interrupting the current. It is a sacrificial device; once a fuse has operated it is an open circuit, and it must be replaced or rewired, depending on type.

The prospective short-circuit current (PSCC), available fault current, or short-circuit making current is the highest electric current which can exist in a particular electrical system under short-circuit conditions. It is determined by the voltage and impedance of the supply system. It is of the order of a few thousand amperes for a standard domestic mains electrical installation, but may be as low as a few milliamperes in a separated extra-low voltage (SELV) system or as high as hundreds of thousands of amps in large industrial power systems.

AC adapter

An AC adapter, AC/DC adapter, or AC/DC converter is a type of external power supply, often enclosed in a case similar to an AC plug. Other common names include plug pack, plug-in adapter, adapter block, domestic mains adapter, line power adapter, wall wart, power brick, and power adapter. Adapters for battery-powered equipment may be described as chargers or rechargers. AC adapters are used with electrical devices that require power but do not contain internal components to derive the required voltage and power from mains power. The internal circuitry of an external power supply is very similar to the design that would be used for a built-in or internal supply.

High voltage electrical energy at voltages high enough to inflict harm on living organisms (numerical definition depends on context)

The term high voltage usually means electrical energy at voltages high enough to inflict harm on living organisms. Equipment and conductors that carry high voltage warrant particular safety requirements and procedures. In certain industries, high voltage means voltage above a particular threshold (see below). High voltage is used in electrical power distribution, in cathode ray tubes, to generate X-rays and particle beams, to demonstrate arcing, for ignition, in photomultiplier tubes, and in high power amplifier vacuum tubes and other industrial, military and scientific applications.

Remanufacturing is "the rebuilding of a product to specifications of the original manufactured product using a combination of reused, repaired and new parts". It requires the repair or replacement of worn out or obsolete components and modules. Parts subject to degradation affecting the performance or the expected life of the whole are replaced. Remanufacturing is a form of a product recovery process that differs from other recovery processes in its completeness: a remanufactured machine should match the same customer expectation as new machines.

Transformer oil or insulating oil is an oil that is stable at high temperatures and has excellent electrical insulating properties. It is used in oil-filled transformers, some types of high-voltage capacitors, fluorescent lamp ballasts, and some types of high-voltage switches and circuit breakers. Its functions are to insulate, suppress corona discharge and arcing, and to serve as a coolant.

Precycling is the practice of reducing waste by attempting to avoid bringing items which will generate waste into home or business. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) also cites that precycling is the preferred method of integrated solid waste management because it cuts waste at its source and therefore trash is eliminated before it is created. According to the EPA, precycling is also characterized as a decision-making process on the behalf of the consumer because it involves making informed judgments regarding a product’s waste implications. The implications that are taken into consideration by the consumer include: whether a product is reusable, durable, or repairable; made from renewable or non-renewable resources; over-packaged; and whether or not the container is reusable.

The U.S. Army Prime Power School is run by the United States Army Corps of Engineers at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri since January 2011, having previously moved from Fort Belvoir, Virginia. The mission of the school is to produce MOS 12P – Prime Power Production Specialists for the U.S. Army.

Refurbishment is the distribution of products, usually electronics and electricals, that have been previously returned to a manufacturer or vendor for various reasons, like not sold in the market or new launch of a product. Refurbished products are normally tested for functionality and defects before they are sold to the public. They are repaired by the original manufacturer and resold.

Mitchell Electronics Incorporated, founded in 1979, is a manufacturer of equipment to test and run servomotors, encoders and resolvers as well as various third-party electronic devices. Corporate headquarters are located in Athens, Ohio, which is also where manufacturing takes place. The company is an associate member of the Electrical Apparatus Service Association (EASA), an international electromechanical trade organization.

Toner cartridge

A toner cartridge, also called laser toner, is the consumable component of a laser printer. Toner cartridges contain toner powder, a fine, dry mixture of plastic particles, carbon, and black or other coloring agents that make the actual image on the paper. The toner is transferred to paper via an electrostatically charged drum unit, and fused onto the paper by heated rollers during the printing process.

Motor control center assembly of one or more enclosed sections having a common power bus and principally containing motor control units

A motor control center (MCC) is an assembly to control some or all electric motors in a central location. It consists of multiple enclosed sections having a common power bus and with each section containing a combination starter, which in turn consists of motor starter, fuses or circuit breaker, and power disconnect. A motor control center can also include push buttons, indicator lights, variable-frequency drives, programmable logic controllers, and metering equipment. It may be combined with the electrical service entrance for the building.

The Association of Electrical and Mechanical Trades (AEMT) is a United Kingdom trade association representing engineering companies in the service and repair industry.

Most of the terms listed in Wikipedia glossaries are already defined and explained within Wikipedia itself. However, glossaries like this one are useful for looking up, comparing and reviewing large numbers of terms together. You can help enhance this page by adding new terms or writing definitions for existing ones.

References

  1. "About PEARL", pearl1.org
  2. "PEARL Recondition Standards for Electrical Equipment", pearl1.org
  3. "Anti-Counterfeit Products Initiative", CounterfeitsCanKill.com
  4. "Counterfeit Electrical Equipment Concerns Draw PEARL Members to a Special Meeting in Dallas", pearl1.org
  5. "The Best Kept Secret to U.S. Economic Growth: Remanufacturing", The Remanufacturing Institute - reman.org
  6. "Remanufacturing: The Next Great Opportunity for Boosting US Productivity", The Remanufacturing Institute - reman.org
  7. "The Remanufacturing Industry: Hidden Giant", Boston University - bu.edu
  8. "OPI Estimate of 2003 Annual US Expenditures on Remanufacturing/Overhaul/Rebuild" Archived 2008-11-19 at the Wayback Machine , OEMservices.org
  9. "NIOSH Publication No. 98-131: Worker Deaths by Electrocution", NIOSH - cdc.gov/niosh
  10. "PEARL Wins California's Prestigious Environmental WRAP Award for Recycling, Reusing Electrical Apparatus", pearl1.org

[1]

  1. Busting Myths About Reconditioned Electrical Equipment