DriveScan – The New Remote Monitoring Solution for Medium Voltage Drives

We’re excited to announce that EMA has formed an exclusive partnership with Powerside to develop a fully integrated, remote monitoring solution for medium voltage drives. Powerside has long been established as leaders in power quality and conditioning, which makes for a perfect marriage with EMA, the world-wide leader in medium voltage drive service. We bring over 50 years of combined experience to the development of this product. The product, called DriveScan, remotely monitors many aspects of your medium voltage VFD, providing invaluable real-time data to lower downtime and operating costs. DriveScan models the behavior of the voltage, current, DC bus, and low voltage power supplies associated with your medium voltage drive. It uses these models to predict failure with algorithms built into DriveScan’s local and cloud-based monitoring system. In essence, DriveScan is a virtual service engineer, one who never sleeps and works 24/7.

During any troubleshooting call, our service engineers carry diagnostic tools, such as digital multi-meters, clamp meters, oscilloscopes, and power quality meters in order to take readings on medium voltage variable frequency drives. Because of the safety concerns surrounding measurements on medium voltage, live testing of medium voltage VFDs is much more difficult and time-consuming than on low voltage VFDs. Since DriveScan is continuously monitoring all of the elements normally hand-tested by field engineers, it presents a much faster, safer, and reliable real-time picture of the drive’s health.

In addition to taking live measurements, DriveScan continuously trends measured data from the medium voltage VFD at a refresh rate of 30 microseconds. These trends can be looked at over time to determine a variety of things, including DC Bus capacitor degradation. Users can set triggers to any and all collected data and the DriveScan will send via email snapshots of all conditions when that particular trigger occurred.

DriveScan also monitors all low-voltage power supplies (15V, -15V, 5V and 24V) in addition to the main power. Although inexpensive typically, a failing low voltage power supply can cause medium voltage VFDs to act erratically causing nuisance trips on the drive and headaches for you.

DriveScan features:

1. Real-time monitoring and trending of:
   1. Voltage
   2. Current
   3. DC Bus of individual power modules
   4. Ripple Ratio
      1. Ripple Ratio = Indication of Capacitor health which could lead to Diode and IGBT failures
   5. Low voltage power supplies (+5V, +15V, -15V and 24V DC)
2. Power Quality Data:
   1. Line sags and swells
   2. Line transients
   3. Harmonic Content
3. Triggered Events and Warnings based on owner preference
4. Weekly, Monthly, Semi-Annual and Annual Reports generated to track the health of your drive
5. Advice for scheduled maintenance
6. 24/7 remote troubleshooting support from EMA’s engineers

Remote monitoring is the wave of the future: don’t be left behind. Let DriveScan and the experts at EMA monitor your medium voltage VFDs for you, allowing you to do your job more effectively.