The toast of Speyside

Scottish single malt distiller The Macallan has fitted 39 ATEX certified motors from technology firm ABB at its Easter Elchies distillery at Craigellachie on Speyside.

This follows a risk assessment and rezoning exercise to meet the new hazardous area regulations, which came into force on 1 July 2003. All of the motors comply with the requirements for Zone 1, improving safety in areas made potentially hazardous by alcohol levels from the distilling process.

The motors, ranging in size from 0.55 to 5.5 kW, are used in a number of different applications such as pumping cooling water, charging and discharging stills, agitating tanks and transferring distillate and spirit. They were supplied by ABB's Drives Alliance and Motor Service partner EDC (Scotland), Ayrshire.

The re-zoning of the distillery provided Edrington, owner of The Macallan, with an opportunity to replace all of its existing motors, improving safety as well as the energy efficiency of the process. "Our previous motors dated from the 1970s,"​ said John Sutherland, The Macallan's company engineer.

"They were inefficient, with many of them having been rewound, and could not comply with the latest regulations. Apart from ABB's good reputation in industry, we had attended one of their seminars on the ATEX regulations and the package on offer was really what we needed."​.

The Macallan​ has also invested in variable speed drives from ABB on some applications, for which VSD certified motors for hazardous areas were selected. "Drives have proved very useful in some areas since they can be programmed to minimise hydraulic shock when charging the stills to a high degree of accuracy and allows us to maximise the properties of heat exchangers,"​ said Sutherland.

ABB​ is a leader in power and automation technologies that enable utility and industry customers to improve performance while lowering environmental impacts. The ABB Group of companies operates in around 100 countries and employs about 135,000 people.