Most prevelant drives in industry?

Catching up on technology lost with years of overseas contracting.

Can anyone weigh in as to what might be the drive or drives most likely found in industry today? Or what you see a lot of?
I have googled but there's a lot of Spaghetti there. AB Powerflex 700, Mitsubishi? Saftronics?..
I hope to look in the water and waste industry, but want to be prepared for as many options as possible, and most importantly don't want to waste hours studying a drive's manual that I am very unlikely to see anywhere.
I will be re-entering the control electrician/ tech job market soon and can program pretty well w/ RsLogix 5000 and want to regain general Drive knowledge.

But honestly, the last project I did in the states was many years ago rewiring a water-plant with Controls I designed and U.S. Filter Telemetry and I used Saftronics GP-10's.

I'll do the digging for the manuals; just asking for your opinion...

I realize this is a VAGUE question, I just want to download a drive manual or two and have a heads up on what I may be "likely to see."

P.S. I am in the U.S. and may wind up anywhere.

My choices:

Danfoss
Control Techniques
Sew
Siemens

I work in the Oil Industry and based on what I have seen in my industry:
1. AB
2. Yokogawa
3. Danfoss

Thanks much

We put a lot of ABB drives into the water/wastewater market.

In the water/wastewater business in North America, I have seen mostly A-B, Saftronics/Control Techniques, Eaton SVX, and Danfoss drives.

For medium voltage it's mostly A-B and Robicon (owned by Siemens).

A lot of it is driven by the DCS or PLC control system; generally if it's an Emerson control system you'll see Control Techniques drives.

Again, this is in my experience selling and servicing A-B control systems in various water plants in the western and northwestern USA. There may be regional differences or whole categories of systems that I've never encountered.

It all depends on your controls platform, mixing and matching 3rd party drives is getting rare because they generally are controlled via comms instead of analog or digital signals. Each PLC maker has their own VFDs (though they are almost always re-branded from someone else) that you just drop into the project.

If you are still using IO control a VFD, ABB is very popular and a great bang for buck.

Altivar VFDs from Schneider are common for 3rd party when using comms because they're very feature rich and relatively inexpensive.

Water and wastewater are generally using large brand name companies - the plant staffs aren't into risk. I have seen more Allen Bradley than any other single brand. However, Siemens is big, particularly in the south east. I had a preference for Eaton, and there are a lot of them out there. Square D, now Schneider, had a big share but lost it, and are now coming back. ABB is making a big push in the market and seems to be making a lot of penetration, especially in medium voltage as noted above.

If you want to catch up on technology study Allen Bradley. If you thoroughly understand them you will understand about 90% of all other brands too. The industry is very competitive on performance and features.

Most sincere Thanks again

Happy new Year All

Tom Jenkins said:

If you want to catch up on technology study Allen Bradley. If you thoroughly understand them you will understand about 90% of all other brands too. The industry is very competitive on performance and features.

Click to expand...

I'd disagree with that. AB sacrifices capability for usability and is, of course, doing it on purpose. Their big selling point is the shallow learning curve. That's why I would argue that learning AB will not prepare you to work with other brands. You should learn a more capable brand, and then you can pick up AB easily.

AB is on the lower end of tech and performance (on purpose as part of a brilliant marketing strategy that obviously worked very well). They did finally outsource their OS (to VxWorks, like just about everyone else). High performance brands would be things like Beckhoff, B&R, Schneider's PacDrive3 (formerly Elau), and a few smaller guys. Mitsubishi and Omron can't decide if they are going to hang back with Rockwell or not, so they have a few high tech things but mostly not. Siemens decided to keep their OS development in house and it's holding them back.

CapinWinky said:

I'd disagree with that. AB sacrifices capability for usability and is, of course, doing it on purpose. Their big selling point is the shallow learning curve. That's why I would argue that learning AB will not prepare you to work with other brands. You should learn a more capable brand, and then you can pick up AB easily.

AB is on the lower end of tech and performance (on purpose as part of a brilliant marketing strategy that obviously worked very well). They did finally outsource their OS (to VxWorks, like just about everyone else). High performance brands would be things like Beckhoff, B&R, Schneider's PacDrive3 (formerly Elau), and a few smaller guys. Mitsubishi and Omron can't decide if they are going to hang back with Rockwell or not, so they have a few high tech things but mostly not. Siemens decided to keep their OS development in house and it's holding them back.

Click to expand...

A) I think that maybe your info on Rockwell drives is out of date. I cannot think of much that a new PF750 series drive cannot do that the other drives you mention can.
B) Several of the drives you mention are not actually made by the people you cite, and some of them are motion control oriented, something the W/WW industry does not need or use.

To the OP, if you have skills with Logix 5000, learn the PowerFlex 5 (523, 525) and 7 series (70, 700, 750) drives, especially the 750 series (but they are all similar). Those integrate almost seamlessly with Logix platform controllers and will be in a lot of AB IntelliCenter MCCs now that connect to the controllers via simple ethernet systems. They are as close to plug and play as anyone can get when integrating controllers and VFDs.

But in the W/WW industry, you will find more and more that the smaller, ie 300HP and under, drives will now be coming in MCCs, so that means the brands that don't have MCCs will become less relevant (for that industry). That means what you will see is AB, SqD, Eaton and Siemens, maybe a little GE although lately they have been quiet. ABB technically has MCCs now, but they don't win many orders. Above 350HP, you will more likely see ABB added to the mix for stand alone LV drives, then Robicon/Siemens as well. In MV, it's Robicon, AB, Toshiba and ABB for the most part.

The main thing i would focus on however is the APPLICATION of VFDs in your industry, the techniques used in making the overall systems function, rather than the specific brands. For example once you understand using an integral PID inside of a VFD in conjunction with a pressure control loop, the details of which brand of drive you implement it on or have to troubleshoot are easier to figure out once it is in front of you.

Of all the VFD repair I have had to hire out....Yasagawa is a hands down favorite of servicemen.
However, I use ABB almost always (price and ease of understanding the display), except I use AB when using RSLogix.

I Have done at least 2 dozen water or wastewater Plants in Alberta Canada and over 80% of the drives have been Eaton. Mostly because they are bid jobs and Eaton is the cheapest of the allowable spec'd drive brands. But also because, as mentioned, the are built into MCC's more and more.

Oil and gas have been more AB and ABB. But it is hit me miss. Also submersible well pumps are usually the same as the brand of pump. Ie Baker hughes centrilift or slumberger.

We have a small waste water plant and we use mostly Powerflexes for our large drives, but there are also SEWs for any resolver systems we use and random drives end up being some Emerson drives we recently began purchasing. Those Emerson drives are pretty nice. There are differences between them all, but most of the American drives are pretty much the same.

Mostly AB and SEW here. A number of problems with the 755's initially, but they seem to be fixed now. A 700 recently fragged its IGBT and it's out for repair. Temporarily replaced with an Eaton borrowed from the HVAC guys. The Eaton's about 20% undersized compared to the 700, but it's doing a fine job.

We have Siemens in one of the other buildings, and they started losing 1 to 4 drives a night when the load would drop in the plant and the voltage would spike to around 490 or so volts. Not much in the way of over-voltage capacity.

Haven't seen a Robicon since '93, when I ended up doing emergency repairs on one (if you had asked me what a Robicon was the day before, I'd have guessed a convention for RoboCop fans).

The Robi's rear-most snubber board had failed and turned a 1 watt resistor into a plasma torch which drilled through the next board and burned the traces off of the front board.

In what had to be one of the ugliest repair jobs in history, I replaced the burned out components with higher-rated ones, drilled through the board as needed to reroute the traces, and replaced the smoked traces with #14 THHN (it was all I had at the time). Worked perfectly.

When the new boards came in from Robicon, mine were pulled and put away in a drawer. A handful of months later, the new snubbers did the same thing. Out came the new boards, in went the ugly ones.