1395 DC Drive Replacement

[Patty2001 0]

Dear All, I have 2361-EATJB-74M-14MCA 1395 series dc drive with 2500 amp amp, armature voltage 700 VDC, 2000 HP, incoming volateg 460 VAC, 3 phase. I want to upgrade this drive, i can't 2000 hp on Powerflex DC selection guide. COuld you please help us to findout the replacement of this drive. Thank you.

[paulengr 44]

That's an awful lot of DC HP. First I suggest you skip talking to AB. The largest DC motor shop in the U.S. is Flanders Electric in Indiana. Start there. I also strongly suggest you first to Siemens. I'm not a big Siemens fan but their DC drives are the best thing out there for servo applications at least. Third suggestion would be to talk to ABB who is also pretty strong in this area, but dealing with ABB can be a bear, depending on your local reps and support. However that being said, with the money involved in doing this, this may be a great opportunity to upgrade to an AC system. Modern full vector AC systems have all the capabilities of large DC systems except they can get more starting torque, more speed, and tighter control out of the same size motor, your power factor goes to unity, and all your brush and commutator maintenance is completely eliminated. Flanders is very experienced in these conversions. My personal experience is that I am the maintenance engineer for 3 four-axis DC servo systems with a maximum output of 6000 HP (eight 1300 HP motors connected to a Ward Leonard loop). I just did an upgrade from an old 1970's grade op amp controller to a Siemens drive based controller where the drives operate the Ward Leonard loop system. The upgrade to the drive system alone was about $1MM US. Going all the way to AC control would have been about $6MM US. At that time there wasn't enough justification to go to AC. However at this time, I could easily justify it. We now have a 4th machine on site (with ABB drives...I'll try to avoid those in the future) with about 3000 HP and again, a 3-axis system. Compared to the others, it is almost truly maintenance-free and gives us more torque/speed/acceleration than we imagined.

[JeffKiper 9]

I second Paul's idea of calling Flanders. They are a huge shop. If anybody is around this area I recommend going to the plant tour. They impressed me when they let me walk through a 22,500 HP motor. They has a 75,000 hp armature out in the yard. I think they had 6 or 7 generators that they used to load test the BIG motors. They are huge I think a Megawatt each. Thier phone number is (812) 867-4014 they have some great guys that do some cool jobs. By the way they know make thier own drives large HP only. The guy that designs the power section for them still goes out on service calls and startups. Those guys have some wild stories. End of promotion....