How Smart Motor Controllers Help Avoid Unplanned Downtime

No matter what industry you look at, three consistent challenges are always working to be improved: How to make the plant more energy efficient, reduce downtime, and optimize productivity. We are going to home in on reducing downtime with the help of some very cool features of modern drives. This list will mostly focus on Allen-Bradley’s technology and drives to serve as examples of what modern equipment can do to save money and time by helping prevent unplanned downtime.

Predictive Maintenance

Predictive maintenance is a powerful utility introduced with AB’s proprietary TotalFORCE technology in the 755TS and 6000T series VFDs. When enabled, the drive will continuously monitor itself and the motor it is controlling’s parameters, such as heat levels, component runtime hours, mechanical stress or wear, electrical anomalies, or blown fuses and internal faults. The drive will anticipate if the component is about to fail and even estimate how long it has until it’s nearing its operational end of life. This allows the maintenance team to address problems ahead of time before they break and become downtime. Depending on the facility size, this feature alone could save millions of dollars. Though this will not be the last time you see TotalFORCE on this list.

Built-in Network Communication

This might seem like a no-brainer, but having a communication network to see data in real time is something that we take for granted. Most PowerFlex drives come with EtherNet/IP, and others can support additional protocols, such as DeviceNet, ControlNet, and Profibus, through plug-in modules. This allows operators the ability to remotely monitor and control their systems, quickly identify which drive is faulty and why, and access real-time parameters to ensure everything is moving smoothly. This allows operators to respond faster to issues and reduces the need for manual troubleshooting.

Adaptive Tuning and Control

The adaptive control setting is one of the most prominent features of the new TotalFORCE technology for the 755TS and 6000T models. This feature monitors your machine’s characteristics and uses algorithms to adjust real-time loop gains and motor response. So if your conditions change, such as belts beginning to wear, loads shifting, or ambient temperature swings, the drive will compensate automatically to maintain optimal performance. The software will not only identify any potentially harmful resonance or vibration conditions, but also actively suppress them for continued operation. This all helps play a big role in reducing mechanical wear on the system as it ages.

Ride-Through Capability

Ride-through is a drive’s ability to withstand short power interruptions such as voltage sags, brownouts, or complete dropouts lasting a few cycles without shutting down or tripping a fault. Imagine you’re running a production line and the incoming power drops for 150 milliseconds or so due to a hiccup in the grid. Without ride-through, your drive might trip, causing the motor to stop and requiring a restart of the whole process. With ride-through? The drive coasted through that blip, and everything kept running like nothing happened. In PowerFlex models, there are a few ways this could be achieved:

DC Bus Energy Utilization

When the input AC voltage drops, the drive relies on energy stored in the DC bus capacitors to supplement the lost power. It maintains control over the motor during this window, which is about a few hundred milliseconds depending on the load and capacitor size. You can find this capacitor-based energy reserve on drives like the PowerFlex 525, 753, and 755.

Kinetic Buffering

In some systems, the motor’s spinning inertia can back-feed energy into the DC bus. PowerFlex drives with kinetic buffering can harvest that rotational energy to extend ride-through time. This is especially useful in high inertia applications, such as fans and centrifuges, as well as long deceleration periods and applications where the motor is coasting down during the power loss. The drive will keep itself alive just long enough to either ride through the loss or shut down cleanly.

½ DC Bus Operation

The PowerFlex 40P drive allows operators to use the ½ DC Bus Operation feature to continue drive output in a brownout or low-voltage situation. This feature allows the drive to operate with half of its normal voltage to maintain output to the motor.

Modular Designs

Drives like the 755, 755T, Kinetix 6200, and others feature a modular design allowing hot-swappable modules on the fly. This allows for field-replaceable parts, customizable configuration without replacing the whole unit, shared components across multiple models, and plug-and-play expansions such as I/O, encoder cards, or safety modules.

PowerFlex 700 Series

The 753 and 755 series VFDs are some of the most modular offerings from Allen-Bradley. These drives allow you to swap out the control module (logic, I/O, memory) independently of the power section. You can also add Ethernet/IP, Profibus, DeviceNet, or more with 1-2 plug-in slots. With it, you can add in optional safety cards to scale the drive’s safety features without buying a new one, field swap fans and HIMs, and remove memory modules to clone configurations to a new unit. The 755T series adds even more modularity for larger drives, including active front-end modules, common DC bus sharing, and precharge units.

Kinetix 6200/6500

The 6200 makes for a modular servo drive platform that builds off of the 6000 series. It allows you to swap parts independently (control vs power), upgrade or change communication protocols without replacing the entire drive, add optional safety or I/O expansions without rewiring your system, and reduce panel space and cabling in multi-axis setups. While it’s not as plug-and-play expandable as newer drives, the 6200 gives solid modularity for OEM setups that need custom network configurations and rapid maintenance. The 6500 takes things a step further and was built for high-performance, multi-axis motion using Integrated Motion over Ethernet/IP.

Final Thoughts

Drives have been getting better, more efficient, and smarter with every new generation. TotalFORCE only amplifies this with their array of smart features, predictive algorithms, and energy-saving hardware. Older drives, such as the Kinetix 6000 series, also carry features that help reduce unplanned downtime. While upgrading to these new drives sounds like a very costly endeavor, so is long periods of downtime and maintenance. In some instances, a new TotalFORCE drive could save millions of dollars in operational costs with its predictive maintenance feature alone. Of course, this all sounds good on paper, but why not chat to a professional about it? We have experts on standby, ready to help you find the right drive with these features to fit your setup. You can call or email us; we will gladly help! Or why not stop by our site and see our selections, as well as some of our other articles that take a deeper dive into these features, like this one here.