Predictive Maintenance with the PowerFlex 750
Lost productivity caused by poor performance or unplanned failure of your automation assets can significantly reduce your revenue and profitability. It is important that you provide plant-wide maintenance services on all your automation assets. The question remains, what is better predictive or preventative maintenance?
What is the Advantage of PREDICTIVE Over Preventive Maintenance?
In order to properly maintain your assets, you need to keep track of various parts of your system. Things such as:
- How long has the fan in my drive been running?
- When is the next time my machine needs to be lubricated?
- How many cycles are on that relay contact?
- What is the runtime on my motor’s bearings?
With the PowerFlex 750 predictive maintenance you can monitor certain parameters within the drive, which reduces the high cost of unplanned downtime due to some of these common factors:
- Lost revenue due to extended downtime
- Long delivery time due to unscheduled replacement parts
- Lost material – work in process
- Lost productivity of workforce
- Not having the correct resources – people and parts
Why Does Predictive Maintenance do a Better Job Than Preventive Maintenance?
We feel that Predictive Maintenance optimizes your maintenance overhead in people, spares, and the time that you actually require. If you do maintenance too often, then you waste time, manpower, and money. If you do maintenance too late, you may cause downtime and increase your costs.
Predictive’s scheduled maintenance plan is a best guess for when maintenance might be required. Because it is difficult to keep track of all the changes in a plant, the result of Preventive Maintenance’s schedule is inevitably wasted money.
Example:
- Larger products = heavy loads, but fewer and longer cycles
- Large orders = running 2 shifts
- Personnel changes can lead to missed scheduled maintenance all together.
The Predictive Algorithm in the PF750 takes into account ambient temperature, air quality, humidity, Vibration, runtime and cycle counts. These are used to adjust the timing of when maintenance is really required, and not just on all the moving parts of the drive itself, but your motor and machine bearings.
Predictive maintenance parameters can be monitored in a controller. This can be very useful when monitoring many drives in a system. The controller can either read the parameters in the drive through Datalinks, or through message instructions in the controller code. The controller can then be used for system maintenance analytics and sending predicative maintenance data throughout the plant.
Contact us for More Information
For more information on the PowerFlex 750 and Predictive Maintenance, contact your Account Manager or contact us on our on-line Solutions Inquiry Form.