Drives&Controls & BACK TO BASICS n SPONSORED BY How much functionality does your application really need? Modern drives offer an increasingly sophisticated range of capabilities, from advanced control and communications, through to integrated safety, condition monitoring and cloud connections. While these can be essential in more demanding applications, not every application requires the same level of functionality, as ABB’s Matthew Hallas explains. In most cases, choosing the right drive for an application will generally come down to matching the capabilities of the drive to the demands of the application. This might sound obvious, but you’d be surprised how often I encounter drives that are overspecified for what they are actually required to do within the context of a machine. There are, of course, applications where advanced drive functions are essential, delivering genuine value through improvements to efficiency, safety, maintainability and performance. However, on some occasions enhanced functionality can introduce cost and complexity with no significant gain or return for the wider application. Choosing the bare minimum in terms of functionality clearly isn’t the answer either. Machine-builders are already working to thin margins, and over-specifying functionality that simply isn’t needed eats into those margins. But under-specifying can be similarly problematic, potentially compromising performance, control, safety and flexibility, or forcing costly machine redesigns late in the development cycle. The starting point should be the application – what needs to be controlled and what doesn’t, what motor technologies need to be supported, and how the motors will operate. Identifying essential communications and safety functions is important, as is the environmental conditions in which the machine will typically be used. Drive selection should not therefore start with a feature list. It should start with an understanding of the machine and its requirements, building outwards from there. The right drive is not always going to be the one with the most functionality, nor the one with the least. Rather, it is a drive that provides the fundamental capabilities required to deliver performance, without adding unnecessary complexity. For machine-builders, starting with the application helps to ensure that drive selection supports not only the machine’s performance in actual operation, but also makes space for other considerations such as design, footprint, ease-of-use and maintainability. The goal is not to minimise functionality, but ensure that the functionality included has a purpose and adds genuine value. For more information about ABB’s ACS180 machinery drive, search for “ABB ACS180”.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjQ0NzM=