Encoders

In General who makes the most rugged encoders?

Specifically shaft mount for motor feedback.

Mounting on rear of motor.

We currently use lenze and they are dying every six months.

These are on a plastics sheeting process so not a real rough environment.

Any suggestions

plc noob said:

In General who makes the most rugged encoders?

Specifically shaft mount for motor feedback.

Mounting on rear of motor.

We currently use lenze and they are dying every six months.

These are on a plastics sheeting process so not a real rough environment.

Any suggestions

Click to expand...

I used encoders from different manufacture, most of them good, when it´s up to me to choose i prefer the ones below.

Have some conveyors system with encoders from leinelinde where we replaced encoders during a rebuilding, that been running more or less continuosly for over 10 years without problem, pretty good I think!

http://www.leinelinde.com/
http://www.trelectronic.com/

This is my personal opinion.

6 monthis is not a long time, I don´t know about lenze encoders but make sure you don´t have an axial force on the encoder shaft, that will decrease the length of life for sure.

I've had good luck with BEI Encoders
http://www.beiied.com/

Steve

I 2nd BEI.

Also, if it's possible to switch to a resolver, AMCI makes some bullet proof models.

Paul

Okie

This is feeding a powerflex 700 drive.

Will it accept a Resolver directly?

What would be the advantage of switching to a resolver?

I have never used them before?

Any experiences or opinions with Dynapar?

We have many of those with shorter than average life.

They Seem cheap built to me.

plc noob said:

Okie

This is feeding a powerflex 700 drive

Will it accept a Resolver directly?.

Click to expand...

nope...at least not to my knowledge. There are some companies that make an encoder that is actually a resolver mechanically, but have a self-contained circuit to emulate encoder pulses. AMCI duracoder is one such example.

plc noob said:

What would be the advantage of switching to a resolver?

I have never used them before?

Click to expand...

http://www.amci.com/tutorials/tutorials-what-is-resolver.asp

A resolver is like a transformer with rotating secondaries. There is no delicate optical disc, just a frequency passing through a winding and some electronics to determine the angle between the primary and secondaries.

We used AMCI HT-20 resolvers at my previous employer and you could literally smack them with a hammer and do no harm.

That was on some tire assembly machines with lots of slam bang pneumatics. We had 13 per machine on over 20 machines. Aside from connector and cable abuse, I only saw one true failure. It turned out to be a loose set screw allowing some slip between the external shaft and the internal resolver shaft.

Paul

plc noob said:

Any experiences or opinions with Dynapar?

We have many of those with shorter than average life.

They Seem cheap built to me.

Click to expand...

We have used the NorthStar encoders from Dynapar.
Not cheap but absolutely bulletproof.
Never had a failure.

Check out Turck

I have been using a lot of units from Turck with great results. Really nice feature is that they have a common 3.5" hollow shaft body with about 20 different inserts to adapt to different shaft sizes. Means you can stock one expensive part for all you different motors and just keep a few cheap inserts to adapt. Price isnlt bad either. they make a nifty mating cordset with A/B/Z indicator lights right in it. Awesome for troubleshooting at the unit.

Cadomanis

The turck option sounds neat. What model or series would that be.

I did not see the insert option looking at the website

Okie

I will look into the Amci mdel also. I need that kind of durability

We use Dynapar HS35 style encoders. They have the steel disk in them and leds on the outside so you know you have power and that each channel is firing.

We have these on all our paper machine drives and they don't fail through running. All our failures have been when we did not use factory harnesses so some soldering broke, or when the encoder would slip on the shaft (use shims to tighten the ring up more).

We recently (last year) changed from Ansaldo drives to AB Powerflex 700VC drives and only use encoders on 6 out of 7 drives which is a great (encoders are on the master/slave configurations). We get great control with sensorless (I was totally surprised on the resolution) and these are the dryer cans which are high inertia loads (paper mills need accuracy of approx 0.05 HZ).