Like everyone I get a great deal of enjoyment out of new projects, there is nothing like a brand new control panel build with it’s shiny new control pushbuttons, bright lamps and clean control lines.
However we also love a challenge so when we were approached to replace a 12 year old critical drive in a laundry in Nottingham we were eager to oblige.
This major laundry supplies hundreds of hotels, restaurants and several military bases in and around the Nottingham district and one of its larger machines had a catastrophic failure of the main washer motor drive after a bearing failure in the main drive.
The original drive type supplied is no longer available so either way a new drive supplier had to be found to offer a suitable replacement, the exising drive used a binary input logic control for speeds and ramp cycles.
Our client S Reddish & Sons electrical supplied us with the old drive manufacturers manual and a machine cycle programme plus the hand written parameters.
Chris Hill our resident software guru and Scott Harvey one of our internal sales support engineers began working on the conversion, the way the logic function worked on the old drive meant it was not as straight forward as would be presumed.
The 55kW replacement drive and braking was selected as the Delta C2000, our customer had used a 30kW previously and was very happy with the Delta drives performance, reliability and ease of use.
The small footprint of the Delta meant it easily fitted into the old drive space, we attended site to make the final commissioning as the parameters needed fine tuning for the spin cycle (126Hz) at site.
The machine was fully tested at heaviest wash load for 3 cycles and under maximum load conditions at the pre-wash cycle of 7.5Hz the current only reaches 68A a reduction of 15% from the previous inverter.
This is largely due to the fact the Delta is an open loop vector drive and controls current very accurately according to the load demand accross the speed range.
Once tested all the wiring was tidied up and everything has been functioning perfectly ever since.
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