Designing a system to run with 2 different power sources

Good afternoon,
I know the title may be a bit confusing, I need to design a control system, to be ran in the US (480 3phase 60hz), to also be able to run in China(380 3 phase 50hz). We are building a new line, to be debugged, and ran off in the US for up to a year, before tearing down and shipping to china for the main production run.

My standard components are;

kinetix servo drives -480v 3ph 60hz
Robot -480v 3ph 60hz
CNC Controller -220v 1ph 60hz
Laser -460 3ph 60hz
And misc. AB control components rated 120-220 60hz.
The largest machine has a 480 100A service.

I am getting lost with the conversion. I can purchase the 480 components to be rated at 380, but am concerned with the change in Hz.

Can i build this machine at the 380 50hz spec, and use a transformer here in the US? How do I calculate the voltage needed for this transformer?

I have never had to deal with this problem before, and cannot find many resources online.

Thanks for your help.

In a previous life, we used to build machines for almost every continent. Our standard was to have everything in our panel rated for 208V 3phase 50hz supply (+-10%).
We would then provide a transformer individual to each customer based on their local supply and bring it down to 208V 3phase. We kept the high voltage components to an absolute minimum.
We found that the change in Hz did make a difference, but it was very minimal, of course component selection is key here and many drives etc are configurable for 50 or 60 Hz.

We didn't run our equipment for as long as you're describing, but it would often be a six month run before shipping.

As far as the transformer goes, we relied heavily on the manufacturers to give us advice on sizing for each individual machine. We would often ball park the figure and then have the manufacturer confirm our calculations. After all, they are the experts (we built machines up to 575V 150A service).

Did it the opposite way around last year, shipped a bunch of equipment, Robot, conveyors and set them up in Minnesota. The robot was an ABB unit, which had a multi tap transformer for use worldwide, which had the European 400 volt primary as well as 475 volt. The robot was indifferent to frequency difference, as the power was rectified to feed the Servo drives for the motors thereon.
We used a similar transformer for the control panel controlling the conveyors, but we used Inverters for all the motors. The motors were european spec 400v star or 230v delta connection, so the secondary of the transformer was 230v 3 phase. By setting the primary tapping which was simply connection to a different set of terminals, we could test everything in the workshop, and easily change the input voltage to work in the US. It all went without a hitch, but all the motors were small, maybe 10 motors 0.75kw each.

Might not be cost effective, but at my prior employer if we were building a system for overseas we would rent a diesel generator and have them adjust the engine rpm to get 50 Hz power.

Thank you guys for your help. I had a little time this afternoon to look at this a bit more.

One thought is to install a 380-480 transformer in china, and run the entire machine as it sits.

The other thought is to build it like it our current one, and replace the 480 primary transformers with 380 primary's when the machine get moved.

I currently have:

7.5 KVA 480-460 3ph isolation transformer for the laser.
10KVA 480-240 1ph transformer to run the CNC system.
3KVA 480-120 control transformer.

All of these can be replaced with 380 Primary transformers.

The robot can be re-tapped to 380.

The four frequency drives are AB powerflex 525's that are rated 380-480 -15%/+10%. I am not too familiar with frequency drives. If I purchase 380 motors, I should be fine there, I would just need to setup the output as a 380 motor instead of a 480, right? And I could run this setup in the US and China?

As for the transformers, we will be building another identical machine for the US, after the china machine, and can reuse the 480 primary transformers.

Any other thoughts or suggestions?

Thanks again
Kenneth

controlseng82 said:

The other thought is to build it like it our current one, and replace the 480 primary transformers with 380 primary's when the machine get moved.
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That's what I did, and it worked great.
Replaced PH250MQMJ with PH250MGJ They are relatively inexpensive.
This was for two machines that I put together last year each had two servo motors and 480V Kinetix 300 drives.
No problems so far with the 380V

KB1GNI said:

Might not be cost effective, but at my prior employer if we were building a system for overseas we would rent a diesel generator and have them adjust the engine rpm to get 50 Hz power.

Click to expand...

I didn't think it was a good idea to run a 60Hz generator at 50 Hz. If the ratio of V/Hz is too high it will cause heating in the laminations. Usually 60 Hz generator protection would trip instantaneously below 55 Hz.

Was this a special generator or maybe the hydro generators I am used to are the special ones.

These were standard trailer-mounted Caterpillar diesel generators. We rented them from a Cat dealer who said it was no problem, they just had to adjust the engine speed down a little bit before they delivered the generator and that the output capacity would be derated slightly as a result. We ran some of them like that 8 hours a day for several weeks and had no issues.
I don't think we were pushing them too hard so maybe if you were using all of the KWh available you'd run into problems, I don't know.

It is possible these were designed for dual 50/60Hz operation, too. Global market, and all that.

Yes i would rent a generator for this, this way the chinese people can see the whole under their working conditions. Another way is to have a frequency converter with inputs of 480 and outputs of 380.