AB Servo Drive and Motors Reliable?

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Thread Starter

Carlos Quiroz

Does anyone have a recomendation (based on reliability experience) between an Indramat Servo Controller and Motor System and an Allen Bradley system?

My system will be approximately 50 axis and about 1500 I/O points.

Thanks for your help,

CQ
 
We have used many AB and Indramat bldc servos on numerous machines. They have performed well in an industrial environment. AB drives are made in Wisconsin and Indramat drives are made in Germany.
 
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Bob Peterson

Servo motors are pretty much generic items these days. The amplifier and control side of it is where I would be more concerned. It is not going to be possible for anyone to give you a reasonable answer without a lot more information on just what you are going to be doing, but for relatively simple motion control, either will suffice. If you are doing interpolation or electronic gearing, the Indramat solution may be a better choice. If communicating with the controllers and drives is a big issue, AB may make more sense.
 
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Both Bosch/Indramat and Rockwell AB have good products. Anohter option is to take a look at Yaskawa Electric's offering of Motion Control products. Yaskawa produces over 30,000 motors per month. Yaskawa's MEAN TIME BETWEN FAILURE is the best in the indusry, important if Uptime is important to you in this application. A large part of this offering is assembled in the Chicagoland are.
 
I think Bosch had given better performance and reliability then AB in the past. However, I totally agree, Yaskawa is among one of the top choices.
 
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Curt Wuollet

We have a couple of printing presses that use Indramat drives. These are powered and run for long periods. When they are shut down we often have to replace a drive or two to get them running again and have prehaps another drive or two that need an hour on before the faults will clear and they can run. And the error message is misleading. This colors my enthusiasm for Indramat. We also replace a couple of AB servo drives a year and as many motors. We have _many_ Lenze drives/motors and replace a handful each year as well. For new work, I use Emerson (Control Techniques) or AB drives, but that's because local support is more of a factor than reliability. Even though I don't particularly like working with them, and doing new work with them might well be impossible with the documentation and software issues, my gut feeling is that the Lenze stuff is our most reliable.

Regards
cww
 
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Davis Gentry

I think that Yaskawa makes the most reliable stuff out there. I run into drives and motors from every manufacturer, and Yaskawa tops my list as bulletproof.

Davis Gentry
Senior Applications Engineer
Delta Tau Data Systems
 
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