How Do I Retrofit a DC Drive to AC Drive

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Hi, I’m Adam Ring with Innovative-IDM. The other day I was having lunch and somebody asked me “how do you go about converting from a DC drive system to an AC drive system?” I thought it might be a good idea to make a quick video. Other people might have that same question.

So there’s a few things you want to take a look at. Number one is what’s the speed that your DC motor is running at? Another thing you want to look at is what is the amount of torque that your application requires? Based on those two pieces of information, you can go back and calculate how much horsepower that you need, and then make sure that you replace your DC with an equivalent AC motor and drive that are going to give you at least that amount of speed, at least that amount of torque. And one of the cool things that happens when you actually switch from a DC to an AC is with a DC you get constant torque throughout the speed range. And that’s one of the reasons a lot of people apply them is because when you are going really slow you can get a fairly constant torque, all the way up to your max speed.

With AC drive technology today, with a closed look flux vector, you actually get the same kind of performance, all the way down to zero speed. You can have 100% of your motors torque down to zero speed. As far as solving the applications, it’s going to be able to respond very quickly, give you the full torque across the entire speed range, and it’s actually more efficient because of the way that the design works. So you actually at the end of the day get to save some of your current that’s required to do a similar application, which basically translates into cost savings for power.

So if you would like to learn more about how to convert your applications from DC to AC, please visit our knowledge center at Innovativeidm.com. After all, we are the home of the legendary customer experience.