New Tech Machinery is excited to announce that the WAV™ Wall Panel Machine is back on the market with some enhancements, including a VFD. Adam Binderup, Senior Mechanical Engineer, walks you through what the Variable Frequency Drive is, why it is essential, and how it works.
Follow along with this article: https://newtechmachinery.com/learning-center/what-is-the-variable-frequency-drive/
Transcript
If you’re wondering what a VFD is and why it’s on the WAV machine in today’s video, you’ll get the answer.
Hi, this is Adam with New Tech Machinery and we’re gonna talk about the variable frequency drive or VFD found on the WAV machine, which is now back out on the market.
And you’ll notice we have all the covers on the machine which is very important from a safety standpoint that whenever you’re running the machine make sure you’ve got the covers on and the shear guard on. You’ll notice the hand hazard warning here. For some of the adjustments on the machine you do need to remove the shear guard. If you’re ever doing that, do not ever stick your hand through the shear either keep your hand completely on one side of the shear or completely on the other side of the shear. That way there’s no chance for injury.
VFD stands for Variable Frequency Drive and what that is is a device that adjusts the frequency of the power going to the motor. And what that does is it allows us to control the speed of the motor. The reason we did that on this machine is that it runs at a pretty high speed, about 150 feet per minute. We wanted to be able to control that because not everyone is gonna want to run that fast. And it also allows us to ramp up to the final speed and then ramp back down again as we’re getting towards the end of the panel. And that does a couple of good things. It reduces the wear and tear on the machine from that initial startup and it also gives us more accurate panel lengths.
The VFD itself is located inside this enclosure near the entry end of the machine. You can see on machines with both gas and electric power you can switch back and forth between them. So you can see there’s two lights on this enclosure. The power on, the green one just indicates that there’s power being supplied to the machine. The red light comes on if there’s ever a fault in the VFD itself. And here’s the VFD located inside the enclosure. You shouldn’t ever need to open the box to work on it, but this is where it’s found.
The VFD settings are found on the control panel of the unique controller, which is now found on all WAV machines.
To get to the VFD settings you press the machine setup button and then the WAV setup button. And on this screen we have VFD enable yes or no.
If you have a WAV machine with just a gas engine only that does not have the VFD, so you would set that to no. If you do have an electric motor you would wanna set that to yes.
The other settings on this screen, the VFD jog slash manual speed, what that is the speed that the machine runs while you’re jogging the material through it or if you’re running a manual job from the home screen. That can be set to a minimum of 20% or a maximum of 50%. 20% is about 30 feet per minute and 50% is about 75 feet per minute.
The next setting is the VFD auto part run speed. And what that is the speed that the machine will run at while you’re running normal production panels. So this one has a minimum of 20% and a maximum of 100% and the a hundred percent being about a 150 feet per minute.
If you ever get an error on the VFD in addition to the red light we looked at earlier you’ll also see this status okay change to red and the reset button will become active and all you need to do is press that reset button to reset the error.
Additional information on the VFD can be found in the WAV manual in Appendix A that goes over the unique controller in the WAV setup section.
The WAV machine is back out on the market. Please reach out to one of our friendly salespeople for quote. Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you in the next video.