Schneider motor management

I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts or experience to share on the TeSys T Motor Management module offered by Schneider Electric. My boss and I were talking about a breaker retrofit on our main distribution panel and options. Our company is a big Square D fan. Anyway that started the ball rolling on some thoughts about safety, downtime, data collection, energy savings, and predictive maintenance. Next thing you know I'm knee deep in research and thought I'd try to pick the minds around here.

What do you want? Energy savings is normally done through a SCADA/BMS system or whatever and is programmed. The motor management unit does not do energy savings - protection etcetera as far as I am aware. Schneider bought Square D years ago.

I realize that Square D was bought out it is merely a brand now.

I know that the unit does not just "produce energy savings". The problem is that we have no idea where our load is, how long things are run, how things sequenced, etc. Its screwed up honestly. Essentially people walk into my plant and just "flip the switch" so to speak. Its going to be hard to affect change without data which they are resistant to gather for some reason.

My personal goal is to have really good motor diagnostics and protection at my maintenance department's finger tips. Again, honestly it has taken my maintenance men 6 hours to find that an bimetallic overload was burnt out on the inside even though the relay contacts made continuity they couldn't find out why the breaker kept tripping. I was not there at the time, but its the stuff that gives me a headache every time I think about it. I basically want a HMI with remote reset capability to tell these morons exactly whats wrong. At least as far as the instrument can understand, which is probably a bit further then these guys' heads can take them.

Pardon my rant. I have read through the capabilities of the device and a good bit of the manual and was just trying to gather thoughts of its potential uses other than just protection without 'polluting the pot'. It supports modbus/tcp and has a large amount of registers with nearly every reading I could want short of megging the motor circuit for me. I really like the remote control capability for the fact that plant shutdowns would be so much easier and complete. I wouldn't come in Saturday to find that my sanitation crew turned half the plant back on and left it running. <<exaggeration of course.

"I wouldn't come in Saturday to find that my sanitation crew turned half the plant back on and left it running. <<exaggeration of course."

I do not believe that is an exaggeration. I am so glad I do not do maintenance in a food plant anymore.

Dan Bentler

There is nothing wrong with the unit but they are expensive. I have used Schneider stuff with Modbus RTU interface many times before but not these units. The units I have used are fine. I see where you are coming from by the way just that my customers would not pay for the unit.
One word of advice when using Schneider and Modbus RTU though if you wish to use, say, 8, 1, 0 it will not work. With Schneider you have to use all the bits and if you wish to use no parity you will have to configure your Modbus to 8, 2, 0. Been caught before.
The little comms module interfaces are good too - just send a command at the speed you wish and the unit will configure itself - very handy.

leitmotif said:

"I wouldn't come in Saturday to find that my sanitation crew turned half the plant back on and left it running. <<exaggeration of course."

I do not believe that is an exaggeration. I am so glad I do not do maintenance in a food plant anymore.

Dan Bentler

Click to expand...

Something must have faulted,
because we left it all running.

Now that sound like normal

I guess I'll come out and subject some of my ideas about utilizing this product to criticism so that I can learn if there would be something that would suit me better.

We have had the allow in several bimetallic overloads go out in the past year since most are 10+ years old they are reaching their lifespan. This product uses ct's and eliminates this problem altogether.

I have a lot of serpentine belting in my plant that we can only assign someone to PM occasionally. If there were issues with the belting (ie: guidance starting to tear up the belt or bearings going out) then a difference on the current draw and calculated motor torque should be able to be seen when compared to historical data.

Because of our washdown environment we primarily lose motors due to water contamination, corrosion of wire nuts, or a seal going out on gearboxes (which normally wouldn't burn a motor but since someone who I have never caught can't figure out why the overload keeps tripping adjusts it up until the breaker starts tripping, shortly thereafter that stainless motor typically turns brown). If I can have a screen tell that guy exactly what caused a fault I feel like a lot of this headache and downtime can be prevented. Of course I could find a way to fire them since retraining them doesn't seem to stick, but there's a whole host of other issues that goes along with that.

If say a bearing started to go out in a motor or gearbox, but was still functional or corrosion had finally started to damage the stator insulation or corrosion was eating wire nuts how hard would this be to detect? The unit can monitor phase imbalance(load and frequency), line voltage, amps (per phase and rms), power factor, and a bunch of other information. I am assuming at this point that I could gather enough accurate data in context to determine if a motor and its equipment is operating properly or if it is begining to deteriorate far enough in advance that I could fix the issue during a shutdown (weekly) instead of it festering into a problem and presenting itself during a run.

Would it not be nice to have crystal ball hooked to computer that flashes a warning XXX motor phase A wire nut deteriorating.

What size motors are running? If mostly 1/2 HP I do not think I would bother with this idea - on other hand if 100 HP well that is a different calculation and may justify cost of detection.

Your guy is tweaking the overload up because the motor tripped on overload so he tweaked it up to get running again because Production God was breathing down his neck.
THE PROBLEM IS he is not required to report this so it can be repaired over the weekend.

They wanted me to jump out the overloads on a pump - I did not want to and won that argument. So it would trip occasionally - they did not want to reduce load on pump - which seemed to me to be the smart thing to do - but management was pretty dumb and insisted on keeping the Production God happy at expense of equipment. It got to the point where I did not care anymore and quit.

Dan Bentler

My motors mainly range in size from 1 1/2 to 3 hp with minimum 40:1 drives. We don't have high speed applications in my plant so everything has a medium to high ratio on it. The issue is that I have over 400 of them. I realize this isn't a lot compared to some plants. approximately 75 are greater than 50hp going up to 500hp.

I realize why they tweak things and the fact of the matter is that I can't change those reasons. My goal is to avoid the issue altogether and if the situation does occur where there is a problem to present enough information to immediately be able to say, "it would be effect production the least if we fixed 'x' problem" or "okay, we'll raise the setting and see if the equipment will hold" of course this is never an option if it presents a safety issue. I would like to minimize the time it takes to find the problems. I want myself, my fellow maintenance supervisors, or the maintenance manager to make that decision though, not some maintenance tech because the production manager is breathing down his neck. I'm loved and hated for this very reason because 9 times out of 10 I take the equipment down and fix it right, then we don't have to worry about it again, meanwhile production is busy pulling their hair out. A couple of hours after they usual say something to the effect of "I'm glad we don't have to worry about that anymore."

Another goal is to be able to get a system in place that will provide us these capabilities, but to present to management I think we can save $xxx in downtime next year, $xxx in equipment replacement costs, the system will be safer because Joe Bob won't have to open the junction box to amp out x motor, we can see exactly what our equipment is doing, accurately track downtime, and hopefully talk the insurance company into thinking that this would be safer and give us a premium break. Essentially I want the capability to make my colleagues, my boss, and my life easier and have enough additional capability to justify the cost to upper management. Of course I like to dream too. I was hoping someone had had some experiences with this or other products like it and how they integrated the system together to acheive these results.

We did a complete tesys project 3 years ago. All the vsd's and dol starters were controlled using canopen. You get a wide range of accesories with the tesys models from ct's overloads etc. You will get alot of info from the starters if using coms to it (ethernet or canopen etc) rather than just hardwiring them from normal i/o. From the plc you can do whatever you want with this info. So it all depends if you guys are willing to spend some bucks to get a proper system in place or not

Think I would pick one of the larger motors that
1. Production does not use or have control over
2. That is started and stopped maybe daily
3. Cycling load ie air compressor or maybe refer compressor

This way you have some way of predicting what should happen and put in instrumentation to determine what really happened. This would be your pilot project and would be the baseline for rejecting the concept or adopting it to other units.

It seems to me from reading between the lines what you really are looking for is a crystall ball that indicates "how many hours till this thing breaks" Now that WOULD be handy.

Dan Bentler

Not a crystal ball so much as a system to help detect potential problems. It would be amazing just to have that ability to say 'we need to take a closer look at this belt after shutdown tonight, its been drawing 10% more current than usual all day'

Even if it wouldn't provide me that information the quality of information a RL G3 could provide when attached to a network of these units might pay for itself just in downtime. Labor is the highest variable expense, that we can control, in my plant. So downtime is typically freaktime to production folks and I understand why, up to $6000/min is a lot of money.

To keep the conv simple. The tesys range with any plc range and any scada with what u want is possibble and has been done before. Initial cost is high but u can make savings depending how detailed u go with the original design on plc and reporting and if u put systems in place accordingly