Important Advancements in Motors and Drives

By Mike Bacidore, Contributing Editor

I recently interviewed Andrew Jaap, business manager — motion with Rockwell Automation to learn about recent developments in motors and drives and how they can help equipment builders and manufacturers. His insights are promising for industrial firms.

Bacidore: What have been the biggest improvements to motor and drives in the past five years?

Jaap: There’s a growing demand for access to machine data to better understand and improve operations, and drives are helping meet this need. The control loops in drives are faster than ever, and that gives you more access to actionable data.

Drives also have new smart capabilities like a virtual torque sensor, which uses the motor as a torque sensor to get data on what’s happening in the driven load. When this data is contextualized, it can give you insights into how your application is running.

For example, it could tell operators that a web of material might be breaking because it’s starting to thin out. The data also can give you maintenance insights, like if a mechanical drivetrain is out of adjustment, which in the past would have required external sensors and people to do data analysis.

Drives also are advancing to meet growing functional safety demands. Increasingly, a safe-torque-off safety function alone isn’t enough on a drive. It also needs functions such as safe limited torque and safe limited acceleration.

Users are increasingly looking at their applications from a system perspective, where production technologies such as robotics can move and interact more closely. Drives with safety functions support this by helping the technologies move and interact in a safe and predictable manner.

Bacidore: What’s the most innovative or efficient motor/drive application you’ve ever seen or been involved with?

Jaap: Servo drives and motors are playing a central role in helping transform operations to address challenges such as the skills gap.

For example, setup axis has traditionally been a manual job, such as when a worker pours product into vibrating orientation bins. But now, servo-driven robots are helping automate these types of jobs — in this case, by picking and orientating product. This allows you to refocus your production talent on areas where their skills can be better applied.

Greater customization and the trend of the “SKU for you” is another need that servo drives are helping address. In the past, changing packaging sizes or other product aspects has required hard stops and resets on a line. Now, these activities are increasingly automated and programmable. A machine can adjust on the fly to each product or package variation coming down the line. Or changeovers can happen near instantaneously with the push of a button.

For example, in one case, an equipment builder created a new servo-driven palletizer that achieves robotic-like precision and a high level of flexibility, all in a conventional design. The palletizer can manage both standard and challenging products. Load-observer tuning technology helps maintain smooth and accurate performance regardless of the product being palletized. And changeovers from one package type or layer pattern to another happen automatically using information from inputs like barcode scanners.

Bacidore: How have motors and drives benefitted from remote monitoring and connectivity?

Jaap: Remote connectivity is helping improve how machines are monitored and maintained. Data from a drive or motor can alert you to a machine issue much sooner than relying on operators to hear mechanical issues.

What’s more, remote connectivity can give your service provider instant access to machine data. This can speed up troubleshooting compared to having on-site staff explain an issue or waiting for a support engineer to fly out to investigate the problem.

But it’s important to know is that data exists and can be delivered however it best suits your needs. Perhaps data from a virtual torque sensor that indicates a potential mechanical issue is best delivered in the form of a stacklight on the machine and an alarm on a human-machine interface (HMI). And performance data such as output can be better suited for dashboards and reports.

Regardless, the data you need exists, and your machine can be architected to deliver it in a way that meets your needs. If data is being accessed remotely, it’s essential that this architecture incorporate layers of security, such as access control and encrypted communications.

Bacidore: Can you explain how software development has changed motor and drive design and production?

Jaap: Machine designers should be thinking of their work from a digital perspective, because large time and cost savings potential exists there.

First, if you’re a designer, you shouldn’t be working across several software packages. An integrated design environment can give you a single place to design, build, configure and test your projects, all using a common interface.

It also can give you access to capabilities such as libraries of reusable code that can cut programming time and help you create more consistent, repeatable projects. And it can help you seamlessly switch between the design environment and simulation tools to help you work more efficiently.

And with digital engineering capabilities such as digital twins and a digital thread, design work can be completely redefined. In a digital environment, you can throw out the constraints that come with physical prototyping.

Instead, you can create a machine, make changes to it with just a few clicks and put it through its paces before you order parts or cut steel.

Bacidore: How do motors and drives figure into digital-twin platform models being used by manufacturers?

Jaap: Digital twin software offers tremendous value at the design stage and beyond it.

Rather than buying parts and spending days of labor on creating a physical prototype, you can apply physics to your 3D CAD and simulate its performance. You can see how the drives and motors run and watch how the entire machine runs, or watch how it interacts with people and other machines. This can help shave weeks off your design time, and ultimately deliver better-performing or customized machines.