Have you ever tried to replace a button? You have to have the right size. A too-small button just can’t hold your clothes together when the buttonhole is meant for a much larger button, and a too-large button won’t go through the buttonhole. You’ve got to have the right size. The same goes for Rexroth servo motors. Rexroth servo motors are very reliable if used and set up correctly from the beginning.
If your servos give you trouble, it’s possible that they weren’t chosen and set up correctly when they were first installed.
Undersized and oversized servos
Undersizing your servo motors is a problem for both safety and ability to turn out the required workload. However, oversizing can be just as bad when you’re burning through energy to power something that’s too powerful for the job it does.
The Department of Energy estimates that over 80% of all servo motors are oversized, creating a greater energy demand than we actually need for American manufacturing. If you think about how much of an impact that has on our energy consumption related to the cost of doing business in the United States, it’s pretty staggering. Choosing the right servos could help solve the high costs of goods and make us more competitive in a global market.
Unneeded upgrades
We’ve said a servo might have been oversized from the beginning, but another reason for oversized servo motors can be an unneeded upgrade.
If your equipment has been around for a while — and we’ve seen Indramat servo motors from the 1970s that just now need work — then you might feel as though it needs to be upgraded, just because it doesn’t match your current operating system or because you want higher throughput.
Matching your current OS is only an issue if you want to watch YouTube on your servo. You don’t. Increasing throughput, though, seems reasonable. You figure a larger and more powerful motor will give you greater speed, higher productivity, and general bigger and better goodness.
Not if you aren’t planning to upgrade the whole factory.
An oversized servo motor uses more energy, and may put more pressure on the rest of your equipment, without improving production at all.
Make sure you have the right size servo for the job.