IEN: What are the primary factors a processor, and OEM suppliers to processors, should consider when planning to purchase drive controls?
Vallier: There are several, and these are the most critical:
- Installation environment, including the environment the drives need to operate in -- do the drives need to be enclosed, or mounted as wall units in an electrical room?
- Interface requirements -- what other product or products does the drive need to interface with?
- Performance -- are all the features built into the drive fully capable to meet the motor-operation requirements, or will extra features, such as application-specific software, be required?
- Scope / breadth of vendor product offering -- are all the capabilities needed built into the plug-and-play drive you are purchasing, or will extra options be required?
- Reliability, such as Meantime Between Failure -- check out the history of the drives that are being specified. Are they workhorses that perform year in and out? Reliability is the ticket to optimum throughput and uptime that result from mechanical equipment that you can count on.
IEN: What are some of the most significant changes in drive controls in recent years?
Vallier: User Interface / ease of use. Drives are able to respond to, and leverage, the intuition that operators already have from operating all kinds of microprocessor-driven electronics. The interfaces of drives strongly resemble cell phone keypads; this is for a reason. Diagnostics are much easier now, as well. Via the interface/keypad, users can push a HELP button, and the drive is able to diagnose what happened. Think of it as much of the troubleshooting guide now being built right into the keypad.
Programmability complements this same series of changes. Macros and assistants make it easy to get more than 80% of applications up and running, without needing to know the specific parameter sets a given motor needs; this is hugely helpful to get up and running, with fine-tuning then being made as processes get refined.
IEN: How do today''s products minimize/eliminate challenges for converters?
Vallier: Flexible programming allows standard (off-the-shelf) products to be customized to meet very specialized requirements. This maximizes uptime and can reduce process change over time. There are obvious price advantages built into being able to use such standard products, as well. In a word, more and more high-performance features are being built into standard products -- and these deliver tremendous user benefits and easy operation to drives buyers.
IEN: Future developments/trends?
Vallier: There will be more and more enhancements to user interface and system identification for auto configuration. That means that users unbox a new drive, install it and, at startup, the drive is able to identify the motor and parameters it operates at -- and then automatically configure itself for operation. For users who historically have certified startup help with this phase of the installation, these enhancements will deliver hours of freed-up time for other work.