Power Flex 40 Faulting after lunchtime after Random Saftey faults

[MountainGoat]

Hey Guys. We get called every 20 minutes to reset Power flex 40s

Although the machine hasn't been perfect it has ran before. We have an integrated machine that uses several process to stamp out Aerosol domes, shape them, curl them, install compound, package and palletize. After the domes go into one of 4 small presses, they collect on a mass conveyer and then get dispersed onto a liner machine, then stacked wrapped and palatized.

When the machine gets any fault: The Cabinets R4 and R3 which house several Powerflex 40 drives will just fault out. Mostly R4 which has to be reset all the time, after any lunch, any issue that happens really. The cabinets also have Allen Bradley 1734 AentR Point i\o with safety source outputs 0b8s that also alarm out. Usually this issue is compounded the more faults and issues we have. Thanks

 

[ptonsparky]

What faults?
The drives? What are the codes?

 

[MountainGoat]

The Errors are F81 and F007. If you reset them they will run for a while until there is a alarm or break like lunch time

 

[petersonra]

Powerflex 40
F7 = motor overload
F81 = comm loss

Have you tried the suggestions in the manual for dealing with these alarms?

What did tech support say about them?

These drives tend to have all kinds of quirks.

Are these on conveyers? the overload might be related to the belt starting up or shutting down with product on it. What is the overload alarm set at? What is the motor current reading when it trips. Might be you can tweak the accel/decel parameters to reduce starting or stopping current.

The manual tells you how to turn off alarm F81. If you dont need it turn it off.

As for random safety faults, there is no such thing. A fault is a fault and a trip is a trip. They are different issues. You might have a safety switch or estop with a loose wire or loose mounting fastener.

Would need lots more information to give you any serious help.

 

[MountainGoat]

Thank you for your reply

By saftey fault I mean any fault that would shut down the operation but the drives still should not fault out.

Good point on the drives for the belts ill have to check parameters. Although even when the machine is at a dead stop they will somtimes go into a fault mode. Doesnt have to be estop.

Also here is the safety modules ai was soeakkng about

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[Jraef]

First off, the F007 means the motor is overloaded, so the VFD is doing what it SUPPOSED to do, unless perhaps the setup programming of the motor nameplate FLA is incorrect. That's simple enough to check in Parameter P033, which should match the motor nameplate FLA. If that's correct, then you have a mechanical problem with whatever these drives are running.

As to the F81 fault, only one of your drives (left side, 2nd one up from the bottom) has what we call a "Maternity Dress", meaning the bumped-out cover indicating that it has a communications card accessory, which then appears to have what looks like a twisted pair of yellow wires coming from it (hard to tell with this resolution). But I don't see anything above that has that twisted pair coming out of it. So we don't know what your communications system is into that drive. But none of the rest of those drives have that, so you might have an internal Modbus network from that drive to the others, that's fairly common because you can connect 31 drives together that way for free. But if that's the case, and that one drive communications goes down, it will affect all of them at the same time.

All of your drives also appear to have the Safe Torque Off accessory card added to them, indicated by the wires coming into the upper left of each drive. Those would not cause the F7 or F81 faults however.

 

[petersonra]

I didn't think you can generate a comm fault on a modbus slave but I guess you can according to this tech note. I have found the comm adaptors on the PF4 and 40 line to be somewhat flakey in general. Maybe if you set the comm loss time parameter higher it would work better.

 

[paulengr]

Thank you for your reply

By saftey fault I mean any fault that would shut down the operation but the drives still should not fault out.

Good point on the drives for the belts ill have to check parameters. Although even when the machine is at a dead stop they will somtimes go into a fault mode. Doesnt have to be estop.

Also here is the safety modules ai was soeakkng about

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Safety modules are highly sensitive to just about anything if it’s not electrically and mechanically very solid, nothing to do with the VFDs.

To put it simply most of the time we strive for minimum downtime. Say for instance we have a proximity sensor to detect presence of an object. Well maybe sometimes it doesn’t work reliably so we put two of them in. In both safety and production systems if both sensors are on or off, we do the same thing. In a production system where we treat disagreement (one on, one off) as probably just a flaky reading so we ignore those so we don’t get false negatives. In a safety system we just assume a bad sensor and trip anyways, giving us false positives. Worse still a lot of those safety modules do tricks like reverse the wiring to test for jumpers and they use force guided relays, not known for high uptime.

 

[Jraef]

IF, at "lunch time", someone in the crew is being lazy and hitting an E-Stop or Safety Sensor rather than walk 10 feet to give it a normal shutdown, that would require a resetting of the safety system to be able to restart. That's a procedural training issue.

But the reported faults are not related to the Safety systems. F007 and F081 are legitimate faults, one being an OL trip, the other being a communications fault. You can't do network safety with PF40s, they have to be hard wired into safety relays, as it appears they are here. If the drive shuts off due to a safety function from a safety relay, it's not a fault per se, it's a legitimate command and the display would read STo for "Safe Torque Off", it would not show a fault number.

 

[GoldDigger]

It sounds an awful lot like the faults are happening during start up of the line, especially if it is a start up from an interrupted working condition as opposed to a start up after a planned complete line shutdown. As has been stated before several times, it is likely that there is an actual motor overload trip (either from mechanical overload or incorrect trip setting) during this kind of startup.
Unless there are some heavy part carriers instead of just the parts themselves, I do not see a reason for a full conveyor to have a significantly higher startup surge than an empty conveyor.
It is possible that there is a varying mechanical load somewhere along the cycle and the unplanned shutdown is causing the integrated line to stop at a high load point in the cycle instead of a low load point in the cycle. (Think of a single cylinder engine being stopped just short of TDC in a compression stroke or an air compressor being stopped and restarted without an unloader valve as examples of this kind of problem.)

 

[MountainGoat]

I was off 4 days and back on 4 days now. My sons birthday and catching up. Really appreciate info guys I will be checking peremeters and and following up on suggestions and thoughts there

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[MountainGoat]

IF, at "lunch time", someone in the crew is being lazy and hitting an E-Stop or Safety Sensor rather than walk 10 feet to give it a normal shutdown, that would require a resetting of the safety system to be able to restart. That's a procedural training issue.

But the reported faults are not related to the Safety systems. F007 and F081 are legitimate faults, one being an OL trip, the other being a communications fault. You can't do network safety with PF40s, they have to be hard wired into safety relays, as it appears they are here. If the drive shuts off due to a safety function from a safety relay, it's not a fault per se, it's a legitimate command and the display would read STo for "Safe Torque Off", it would not show a fault number.

Yes its basically all the time and any time it shuts down or stops SP1 or SP2 can go into saftey faults and the ooerator is trying to reset the machine while it keeps faulting

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[MountainGoat]

It sounds an awful lot like the faults are happening during start up of the line, especially if it is a start up from an interrupted working condition as opposed to a start up after a planned complete line shutdown. As has been stated before several times, it is likely that there is an actual motor overload trip (either from mechanical overload or incorrect trip setting) during this kind of startup.
Unless there are some heavy part carriers instead of just the parts themselves, I do not see a reason for a full conveyor to have a significantly higher startup surge than an empty conveyor.
It is possible that there is a varying mechanical load somewhere along the cycle and the unplanned shutdown is causing the integrated line to stop at a high load point in the cycle instead of a low load point in the cycle. (Think of a single cylinder engine being stopped just short of TDC in a compression stroke or an air compressor being stopped and restarted without an unloader valve as examples of this kind of problem.)

Here is a layout of where the panels are and how they operate. Main press runs one of two models and sends domes over to a pool conveyer then 4 smaller presses (Bruder 1,2,3,4) stamp and reshape and send to the liner areas. The Liner conveyer somtimes gets jammed but as soon as the line goes down the we get a SP1 or SP2 saftey fault and R3 panel drives are faulted out with the formentioned codes

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[Jraef]

Yes its basically all the time and any time it shuts down or stops SP1 or SP2 can go into saftey faults and the ooerator is trying to reset the machine while it keeps faulting

OK, that's weird, because "SP1" and "SP2" faults were for devices that had what was called a "SCANPort" communications port (SP stands for ScanPort, 1 and 2 were which one of the two available ports). But the PowerFlex 40s don't have a SCANport.

The older 1336 and 1305 drives did, so my suspicion here is that your machine USED to have older drives on it and the CONTROLLER was originally set up to display a ScanPort error when the PLC lost communications with a 1305 or 1336 drive, and now, something is still displaying SP1 or SP2 when communications go down for the PF40s. So something is definitely wrong with your netwprk communications and/or old programming that is looking for something that no longer exists. Might be time to have A-B's field service people come out and take a look. I know the guy that works out of their Salt Lake office, he's pretty good.

 

[MountainGoat]

OK, that's weird, because "SP1" and "SP2" faults were for devices that had what was called a "SCANPort" communications port (SP stands for ScanPort, 1 and 2 were which one of the two available ports). But the PowerFlex 40s don't have a SCANport.

The older 1336 and 1305 drives did, so my suspicion here is that your machine USED to have older drives on it and the CONTROLLER was originally set up to display a ScanPort error when the PLC lost communications with a 1305 or 1336 drive, and now, something is still displaying SP1 or SP2 when communications go down for the PF40s. So something is definitely wrong with your netwprk communications and/or old programming that is looking for something that no longer exists. Might be time to have A-B's field service people come out and take a look. I know the guy that works out of their Salt Lake office, he's pretty good.

Yes makes sense. They had to replace ethernet switches because they were always mis communicating

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