Voltage can fluctuate in industrial settings and if you don’t ensure you’re getting what your equipment needs, it can take a toll on your productivity.
Ensuring that your Indramat and Rexroth machinery is receiving the right amount of power and doing routine checks on the input voltage is important for maintaining your equipment. This is especially important for Rexroth and Indramat drives. If the power is too high or too low, there can be negative effects very quickly. Indramat equipment operates best at the correct voltage.
High voltage can cause damage quickly. Overloaded circuits inside of your drives can literally fry –which means costly repairs that can shut you down for days. On systems with Dynamic Braking circuits, you can pit your Dynamic Brake circuit against a nuclear power plant, a matchup that never ends well for the drive. Make sure to check your input voltage often as part of your routine to make sure your equipment is operating at the optimal rate and isn’t being damaged over time. If your voltage varies often, you’ll have to check with the electricity provider about providing stable electricity to run your machinery.
24vdc power problems
On field service, when encountering a system that makes you think Rod Serling is about to step out from behind a column and explain how you have dropped into the Twilight Zone, we always check the 24V. Not only to see if it is between 22-26V, but also to see that the ripple is below 2v.
At a particular customer service call, we came in to find drives running backwards, machines taking off without the formality of start buttons being pressed, and other weird things. A check of the 24VDC gave a near perfect 23.999Volts, but when checked on AC, the meter showed a 54 volt ripple, which meant that the drives thought all I/O was being turned on and off 60 times a second.
This machine also showed a favorite design flaw of mine. All of the 24V was being supplied by one power supply on a machine nearly 300 feet long. If a valve at one end fired and spiked the 24V system, the drives caught the entire spike. Think about breaking your drive control power out to an isolated 24v system if you have this flaw.