AB Drives Vs Yaskawa Drives

What would be valid reasons to choose an ab drive over a comparable yaskawa drive on a ab system with contrologix?

Both have ethernet ip. Price is not any issue or consideration in any way just features and performance.

I would say the ab drive is better because it has AOI and diagnostics can be mapped into the hmi and plc with less work.

I know ab is very good about selling individual parts and boards for their drive and also providing service manuals to do in house drive repairs but i do not know how or how well yaskawa handles this?

Other opinions and comparisons?

Power flex 4

hello,

i work for a large Canadian Run bakery here in the Uk, MAPLE LEAF to be exact and as you would presume all we have is Allen Bradley Invertors, PLC'S, HMI'S even relays etc etc, the only one fault with the drives is that they seam to have a knack for when been powered up the diplay been blank as if no power is present, but when checking with a meter it was, after about 5/10 min then most often they would come back online and be fine, sometimes they wouldnt then opther times the 7-segment display would just light up all the segments and all the LED's would be on with no way of resetting, thats my experience of the flex 4's and we must have over 150 on site.

let me know if anyone out there is experiencing this same problem.

other than that they are excellent drives easy to setup you can use Drive Executive and a DSI serial converter (22-SCM-232) to easily program settings and also save these to your laptop so if your drive fails etc you can grap one from the stores and transfer the settings straight to the drive and then install, i dont have any knowledge of the yaskawa drives so cannot compare.

hope this helps

Rob

If we go ab it would most likely be powerflex 700

well we do have them at work which run mixers so they arent running 24/7 like conveyors which run PF4's

sorry i cannot help

Rob

As a general rule, it is always a good idea to try to stick to the same brand for the different components of a system: integrating and maintenance become much easier. So in this case choosing an AB drive looks almost like a no-brainer.

I am not aware of any significant advantage or disadvatange of an AB drive vs. a Yaskawa one, as long as cost is not a factor. Well, AB clearly wins in at least one respect: much better manuals and documentation.

On the other hand it would be fair to note that Yaskawa is first and foremost a motion company; drives and motion controllers are their bread and butter. For AB, as everyone knows, motion is only a part of a huge business in other areas.

The Plc Kid said:

What would be valid reasons to choose an ab drive over a comparable yaskawa drive on a ab system with contrologix?

Both have ethernet ip. Price is not any issue or consideration in any way just features and performance.

I would say the ab drive is better because it has AOI and diagnostics can be mapped into the hmi and plc with less work.

I know ab is very good about selling individual parts and boards for their drive and also providing service manuals to do in house drive repairs but i do not know how or how well yaskawa handles this?

Other opinions and comparisons?

Click to expand...

Configuring the drive over the communication protocol. One thing I like about the AB products connected via DNET, CNET or even ENET ( which I have not done yet ), is the ability to use DriveTools to configure and store the VFDs parameters from my laptop by connecting to the Contrologix PAC.

If the Japanese drive can be configured by DriveTools, is lower in price and uses all the AB protocols, then go for it.

What's the application??


This might bring up some comments too

Kid

If I recall correctly your company is using AB extensively already. Seems to me to stay with it mostly because you have shown it works and even more important it is what you know and used to.

Dan Bentler

We have lots of PF700s here and they rarely give us any trouble. They use a modular design so that the comm boards and I/O boards can be shared among all the different sizes.

I have a few small Yaskawa drives on one machine and haven't had any trouble with failures, although I did have to do some motor troubleshooting on one of them recently. The manual was okay with me, and the little drive seems just fine.

Another thing that is really good about A/B (that they don't often get credit for) is the fact that they will support their products for decades in most cases. That might also be true of Yaskawa. Perhaps a Yaskawa fanatic or regular user can enlighten us on this.

I am for AB mut management has this wild hair in their a%* to go with yaskawa. I think it has to do with the buddy system. I was just gathering info to strenghten my argument.

Looking on yaskawas site i found no service manuals like ab has that has board level troublshooting internal component connections and component values.

Yaskawa has good rugged drives. We have used them for years. My company is switching over to AB systems in our new plants - PLCs and Drives - and from the startups I have been on their drives are good also. We had some "qwerky" issues with some communications and timing issues in some of motion control applications with the AB, some was learning curve issues. One advantage of Yaskawa is their FREE support and responsiveness of their engineering staff. On the negative their drives are not as flexible as the AB.

My 2 Cents,

Dan

both series of drives do have the software to allow connection via laptop I prefer the AB series over the yaskawaska. I rarely had trouble with either, So in my case its more a preference. Most of the drives in this plant are AB. The standardization is handy just be careful not to run the AB drive in senserless vector on multi motor configurations

In my view, this standardization issue in a particular plant is way overstated. In today's drive world, drive technology rolls over about every 4 years and every manufacturer comes out with new designs. Some even change their software configurations with every new release so you have to repurchase and relearn all of the programming aids. So, you are stuck with learning, learning, learning whether its all one brand or not.

What I think should matter most is what kind of LOCAL support is available for the brands you are considering. That would include availability, cost if any, and level of skill. Assuming the hardware reliability is similar, all other considerations, in my opinion, rank a distant second.

well yes and no DickDV lets tke for example in my plant were in the top 10 in the world for over all size in this particular industry. If we did not work on standardization we would end up having to stock the parts for too many components that the part area would not be able to shelf it all. Unfortunately not everthing here is standardized around 50%. but on scale heads I use 2 types of indicators for all my applications so for 150 scales I only need to stock 4 load cells and 4 heads to maintain 150 bench scales. For the pit scales which is the second type I only need 1 set of load cells and one idicator. same goes with the printers I have one supplier that handles all industrial printers all are datamax. this makes one set of parts and one spare printer. this is out of 49 pinters. Now we have 300+ vfd applications. 90% is ab 1336+ which is being phased out to the powerflex series. I'm sure you can see the savings in parts needed to maintain this as well as the fact that parts in the parts room is taxable.