Save stress, on your motors and yourself!

ABB drives have access to plenty of tools to aid you in preventing damage to your motor or your drive. Here’s a walkthrough on setting up the temperature protection function on an ACS580.

An ACS580 variable speed drive can take several sensor types into an analogue port to act as temperature monitoring for the attached motor. These can also be used to control the system based on different external temperatures such as shutting down the drive if the ambient temperature gets too high. Now the first three parameters 35.01, 35.02, and 35.03 are read-only and display our estimated and measured temperatures.

35.11 is where we select our sensor to start setting this up. The sensor types that the ACS580 can take are KTY84, Pt100, PTC, Pt1000 and Ni1000. The drive can use one of the inbuilt analogue inputs for these sensors with an option to add an additional PTC isolated input using the CMOD-02 expansion module or an ATEX rated PTC input using the CPTC-02.

Once your sensor type is selected, we go to 35.12 to set our fault limit. This is the temperature at which the ACS580 will trip with fault 4981 External Temperature 1. We set this value to the temperature at which we want the drive to automatically shut off.

Next is parameter 35.13 Temperature 1 Warning Limit, this is the temperature at which the system will generate a warning that you can use over your communications as a trigger to adjust your controls, again we set this based on our motor and ambient temperature.

Parameter 35.14 is where we select the analogue input that our temperature sensor will be attached to, typically this is AI1 or AI2 from the inbuilt inputs, but it can also include the previously mentioned expansion modules.

Now parameters 35.21 through 35.24 are the same thing we just did only for a second option set. These are for if you wish to have another sensor setup, either as a backup on the motor or monitoring another temperature.

35.31 is where we can enable the safe motor temperature, but this is only valid with the CPTC-02 module and allows us to set temperatures to activate the safe torque off before we fault the drive.

Under 35.50 we define the ambient temperature of the environment. This is typically used in conjunction with estimated motor temperature for systems that do not actually have any kind of temperature feedback.

With the last group of 35.51 through 35.55 we can define the motor more carefully to ensure a more accurate temperature model, but again this is primarily relevant when using the motor’s estimated temperature which we are not covering here.

Now the setting required for each sensor type vary, but they can all be viewed from page 284 of the ACS580 firmware manual, which has been linked below under parameter group 35.11.

http://searchext.abb.com/library/Download.aspx?DocumentID=3AXD50000016097&LanguageCode=en&DocumentPartId=1&Action=Launch

Congratulations, you have now saved yourself the hassle of replacing a burnt-out motor.