BMG’s Danfoss range includes the VLT decentral drive FCD 302, designed for installations where multiple AC motors are spread around a facility. Typical applications include bottling, food preparation and packaging plants.
“In these applications, where cabling costs are excessive and control room space is limited, it makes sense to get the speed controller closer to the motors,” says David Dyce, BMG’s electronics manager. “Unlike some decentral drive systems, the FCD 302, which is a one box concept, can be mounted close to or directly on the motors. This system is designed to minimise design and installation costs, at the same time ensuring efficiency and total reliability of the drive system. There is no need for field distribution or drop down boxes and no external 24 V DC supply is required.
“Another advantage is any drive trip can be quickly and accurately isolated to a particular drive unit, which enables simple maintenance and increases uptime of the system.”
This new generation high performance decentral drive is available in two frame size dimensions to match the requirements of different production applications including dry areas, wash down installations, and for hygienic environments.
This new system, which has an IP66 enclosure for dust ingress protection and a guard against high pressure water jets from any direction, meets stringent hygienic standards, including the new ‘European Hygienic Engineering and Design Group’ (EHEDG) regulations.
These new decentral drives are proving to be popular with OEMs, as there are fewer boxes to be mounted with less connections and terminations so that labour costs are significantly reduced. The OEM is able to deliver the whole conveying system prewired and tested, which reduces commissioning time after installation.
The advanced vector control of this system enables compatibility with permanent magnet motors and asynchronous motors, without the need for an encoder. The FCD 302’s safety features include a standard safe stop functionality that prevents the drive from starting unintentionally. The drives are available in power ratings from 0,25 kW to 1,4 MW, in a standard version FC301 and an advanced high dynamic version FC302, with additional functionalities.
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