Industrial Electrical Shortcomings

The SEW Euro Drives

During the major overhauling of our plant last week, I decided to do service and maintenance of all SEW Euro drives. I have exactly 14 SEW drives in our plant. None of them have been taken out of the panel yet for service and maintenance jobs. My plant belongs to the Crete industry so imagine the level of sand, dust, dirt, and cement particles I have in the surroundings.

There are a lot of versions of SEW drives available in the market but I have the MDX61 series in our plant. The number 61 on the nameplate lets you know that the drive has the option for optional cards. What a drive with the red and black color combination you just see and see it. Easy to install and commission. You can even commission any SEW to drive with DBG60B Keypad through copy and paste parameters.

There is an external memory card. If you have the same hardware, just insert the memory card and the drive will run. I take a backup from time to time with a USB11A interface adaptor and through MOVITOOL software and I have backups of all SEW drives and indeed it's a plus point for me to have backups.

Now come to the point, I got the SEW drives out of the panel one by one. I got the drives cleaned with an air blower, paintbrush, and contact cleaners because some of the dust doesn't come out easily until you unsettle it through paintbrushes or anything else. Tons of dust came out from each drive. It felt like these drive nothing but produce dust.

To cut my story short, When I got the machine turned on, there was sparking inside one of the SEW drives. Sooner I got the machine turned off but the damage had been done. Once again I made the machine turn on, there was not any sort of sparking inside it this time. The drive neither was working nor showing any fault on the seven-segment display. The parameters in the memory card had been lost too.

Luckily, I have the same hardware when I inserted the memory card the new drive didn't work. I had to connect my laptop and downloaded the parameters. The new drive started to work after downloading the parameters. I already have the same specification defective drive and this was the second one in a row. I started to unbox the defective when I reached the power card section, there I saw the IGBT had gone damaged. Have a look at the images.

I started to unbox the previously defective drive and took the IGBT card out. I made the IGBT card installed inside a recently defective drive and box up the drive. In a nutshell, I made a drive from two defective drives. I made the drive installed inside the panel and turned the power on. I found everything up to the mark upon turning the power on. The operator gave the command to that drive and it started to work smoothly.

Thanked GOD, and it worked.

This is how I saved the cost of a drive. If I had not had the backup of the parameters, The plant had not run at any cost on that day. At the end of my article, I would like to say:

The backups make our life easier.