We recently had a customer with a tough problem that was easily resolved using the DriveScan Remote Monitoring Tool.
The customer has a 1000 HP Toshiba T300MVi running a mixed liquor pump at a water reclamation facility. In the span of about 48 hours, the drive randomly shut off unexpectedly multiple times, leaving the operators scratching their heads. The initial thought was that the drive had a problem (the drive tends to get blamed often), so the customer called us for help.
DriveScan gives EMA service engineers and end users the ability to remotely monitor multiple aspects of the VFD, including fault history. DriveScan showed no recent faults, so we knew that something external was likely causing the drive to shut down.
DriveScan keeps trended data from the day it is commissioned, which gives invaluable information for troubleshooting, root cause analysis, and future failure prevention. In this particular case, we looked at output current and voltage from the time in question and saw the drive had run at about the same output voltage as normal (indicating the output frequency was similar) but the output current had dropped significantly from what was “normal.” DriveScan trends can be grouped into years, months, weeks, or days, so to give us a decent snapshot, we looked at a week’s trend, which gave us information before, during, and after the questionable events took place.
The trend showed four different run periods of between one to three hours after which we could see the output current and voltage drop off completely, indicating the drive had stopped.
While on the phone, we asked the customer to run the motor again and using the live meters feature of DriveScan, we were able to verify, in real time, that the motor was pulling around half of the current it traditionally pulls based on the trends. Because the motor was pulling what was essentially no-load current, we advised the customer that there was likely a pump or valve problem as indicated by the low current draw.
The customer investigated the pump and in a few hours, found the pump had an airlock and their low-flow sensor was shutting the drive down. They resolved the airlock problem and reran it shortly after. Using DriveScan in real-time, we verified the motor current had jumped back up to what it traditionally runs at. The pump was once again pumping properly and they have had no problems since.
Because they had DriveScan, the customer was able to avoid a costly field service call and quickly determine the source of the problem. Without DriveScan’s trending and live data, troubleshooting this would have been tedious and time consuming with an increased risk of pump damage.
We’ve had multiple examples of DriveScan saving our customers hundreds of thousands of dollars in downtime and equipment loss. For some more of those examples, see here or here. Does this sounds like something you could use?
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