My company is purchasing a packaging machine with servo motion control. Our requirements stated that all servos would be Allen-Bradley (our plant PLC standard). The vendor wants to substitute Indramat Drive. Does anyone have experience with these drives- reliability, performance, customer support, etc.

 

First of all I feel sorry for you that your company forces you to use such a substandard drive/motion (AB). They have very good marketing techniques as far as drives and motion are concerned. I would suggest you read their manuals and then compare their product to others in black in white, you would be surprised. Don't believe in the idea that CLogix motion is the best thing since sliced bread.

Second, I have experience with Indramat, they have very very reliable drives and are fairly easy to work with. My distributor came in and gave me a couple of hour overview (hardware/software) over the exact Indramat model an OEM provided me on a packaging machine (this uses xbus and cam tables), and I learned everything I needed to know to support this drive in 2 hours (I have a fair amount of motion experience though). Others have better solutions than indramat (but not AB), and if this machine uses Sercos I would consider using something else. I do not believe you can fit a plant into a "one drive mold". Some drives/motion controllers work better for other applications as well as make them simpler.

Your plant should consider a better standard (Application Dependent) like http://www.emersonct.com or http://www.ssddrives.com (Parker/Compumotor SSD Drives division) or for serious motion applications http://www.deltatau.com

BW

 

We used both AB and Indramat drives on large machine tools for years. They both performed well
and reliably.

George Younkin
[email protected]

 

I wouldn't worry about Indramat servos, they are widely used in high volume production lines.

Bill

 

Indramat servo drives for brushless motors are very reliable.

Indramat AC drives remarkably more reliable than, Siemens 650/611 Spindle drives. This conclusion maiden after 10 years experience with Siemens and Indramat.

Mike Virgiliev

 

I haven't been too impressed. We have a printing press (two actually) that use Indramat drives. When we shut down, which isn't often, and got to start up again we often get to replace a couple for "rectifier failures" and have another couple that need an hour of power on time before the faults will clear. Just another datapoint.

Regards

cww

 

Differentiating between problems that are truly caused by a particular servo manufacturer's drive/motor combo as opposed to marginal installation techniques, improper sizing, and other factors can be difficult. That said, I've had reasonably good results with Indramat drives from the older DDS series, as well as the Ecodrive line, but with several caveats.

They (at least DDS drives and their power supplies) have a tendancy to perform poorly when fed with a line supply contaminated with commutation notching generated by larger DC drives. We blew up supplies, and/or experienced spurious faulting on a regular basis until installing isolation transformers between them and the line. Once we got past this problem, and became accustomed to their idiosyncrasies reliability has been good.

Follow Indramat's wiring recommendations, especially those involving grounding, wire sizing, and filtering. Install the recommended AC line reactor, and DC link choke.

Thoroughly document the installation with all part numbers for amps, drives, and, if so equipped, the drive 'personality' modules (they use some other name for them; it isn't coming to mind).

Their motor-mounted cooling fans don't hold up well if the ambient air is dirty. If the motor is driven hard and the fan is stalled you'll end up with encoder failures. In our installations improving ambient air quality wasn't a viable option, and we ended up remotely mounting blowers, and ducting air to a modified fan shroud.

If you use water-cooled motors pay attention to Indramat's guidelines regarding condensation. If you don't, and use motors with an internal brake option the mechanisms rust, and eventually bind.

Customer support ... hard to say. The preponderence of personal experience with their technical support has been generally favorable, but they did send one guy early on in the "power supply blowing up" period who blew up a Scopemeter by connecting one probe return clip to ground, and the other elsewhere (a bad thing to do; on this Scopemeter the probe returns weren't isolated from one another).

 

CWW:

I have a Rexroth Rep who is trying hard to convence me to allow Indramat drives to be installed on our new Cartoners. This Rep visited us yesterday here at our site and brought along the local distributor (I was already familiar with the distributor, but did not know they handled Indramat). I forwarded your comments to the Rexroth Rep and asked him describe what Rexroth was doing to solve your problem (I had heard of this problem before). As a result, the Rexroth Rep would like to contact you to assist with the problems you are having - and I am curious if they would actually help you as well. Would you care to be contacted by this Rexroth Rep?

 

Water under the bridge at the moment. All repaired at great expense or replaced and we probably won't shut down again till the end of the year. But any solution after you have swapped drives out on expensive downtime is sorta missing the point. That moment in time would however, be a great time for a rep visit.

Regards

cww

 

In my experience it has more to do with the level of support available and your willingness to learn the ropes on whatever system is installed.

I haven't been overly impressed with the AB stable of motion and drives offerings - that said, 90% of applications don't need an ultra high performance drive.

The Indramat drives we have integrated have performed remarkably well - but! In certain applications we have blown up quite a number of them and ultimately replaced them with CT UniDrive SPs (40kW high speed machine tool spindle drives). We retained the balance of 6 EcoDrives on these machines with good success.

If you have a good brand X distributor who is motion centric I would by far prefer this route than the run of the mill talking hairdo that usually shows up trying to sell pipe, wire and brand Y servo drives.

In my case, the local Indramat talent runs circles around the readily available AB motion talent.

Ken Brown
Applied Motion Systems

 

Bosch Rexroth (formally Indramat) has very reliabe drive and control system. You will find that they are genuine about supporting both the OEM and end user. If I were you I would be looking for a SERCOS based system for a cartoner that is open, this way you leave your self an our long term, if you control is propritory (AB) you have not choices.

A clear positive for Rexroth is a cartoner is a very straight forward application for them in the PPC controller. This controller has full ELS (electronic line shaft) capabilities. The built in high speed PLS might alsp help you with your gluing. They can easily tie this into the PLC of you choice with EtherNet/IP or a fieldbus like DeviceNet or Profibus. Rexroth focuses on packaging machines so they know your application type.

My suggestions:
1. If the OEM want to use a specific brand they probally have reasons. They have been satifies with the support and product.

2. Make sure you identify the local application support guys form both the distribitor and Rexroth. They are key.

3. Rexroth is willing to do onsite training once you have recieved the machine. Take them up on the offer it will be time well spent.

Regads,

Shawn Nelson
www.motiontech.com