DRIVING AUTOMATION SUCCESS

RE-EXAMINING THE ROLE OF DRIVES IN AUTOMATION TO IMPROVE DATA ANALYSIS AND ENHANCE RELIABILITY

- MAT KHAN

WITH THE LOCK-DOWNS JUST BEHIND AND Industry 4.0 at the door, machine builders are under extreme pressure from demands for cost-effective automation. Drives play very important role in automation technology in terms of providing variable motor speed acceding to machine or process requirement. Since motor load is said to be constituting nearly 70% of the electric load in the manufacturing industry, drives have significant role to play in energy saving too.

In the manufacturing industry, automation subsystems like drives are often overlooked in terms of their ability to improve data analysis and enhance reliability when drives have the capability to interpret and analyse different indicators themselves.

“There are mainly three types of drives used in current automation; soft starters, VFD motors, and servo drives. We use these drives in all our shuttle products,” says Taranjeet Singh, Chief Manager for Automation Department, Addverb Technologies.

Generally, he says motors can be controlled in two modes – positional control and speed control.

“In positional control, we take a position or allocation as a reference point and travel accordingly. In case of speed control, we take a certain speed as a reference and when the position comes it decelerates accordingly.”

Singh points out that these days the drives are automatically tuned, through specific software. “Otherwise, there are other proportionate differential indicator controls which are used to estimate the behaviour of a machine from the time it starts till the end.”