SMV Variable Frequency Drive VFD Basic Startup And Commissioning

About This Video

This video covers the basic startup commissioning of the Lenze AC Tech SMV Variable Frequency Drive VFD. It covers everything from wiring considerations to basic programming and goes into detail while demonstrating an actual motor in action.

WARNING: All electrical equipment should be handled by qualified electricians. Make sure to adhere to all local, national, and international safety laws when handling your equipment. Failure to do so could result in severe injury or even death.

Hello again, everybody.

Craig Chamberlain with Precision Electric [here] and today we’re actually going to be commissioning the Lenze SMVector Variable Frequency Drive. Notice how I have it awkwardly sitting on this counter top. That’s because my cables aren’t exactly the longest cables in the world but it’s going to get the job done.

So today we’re actually going to say you purchased a drive from us hopefully, and you received it in the mail and you are going to commission it. Now of course, as the beginning of this video said, this should only be done by a qualified electrician. Somebody who absolutely knows what they’re doing. Adhere to all the warnings are in the manual as well because we will be using the manual during this commissioning process. No matter what drive you might be using, [it] is very important that you have a copy of the manual for yourself as a reference because these drives are capable of a lot, and your manuals your best friend when it comes to that.

So let’s go ahead and just dig right in. I’m going to pull up first the section on the manual called Electrical Installation. Of course you want to make sure you read over all the warnings. The very first warning of course is if you leave it off and in storage for very long periods of time, you don’t want to just operate it out of the box. You kind of want to leave it running for a little while before then. But let’s go ahead and scroll down to your mains connection. Depending on the drive that you purchase there is an ESV, then there’s a number, then there’s an N01, N02 and an N04 or an N06. That’s all of your voltages. The N01 would be 120 volts, N02 would be 230, N04 would be 460, and N06 would be 600 volts of course. So depending on which one you bought it’s going to depend on how you’re actually going to wire your mains connection.

Now this particular unit I have is an SXB which is actually 120 volts. So I’m actually powering this with a wall plug. This unit uses the wiring diagram that we’re looking at right now in the manual for 120 volt supply. I obviously don’t have this fused properly but you can see where I brought my L1 power in on this unit. I should have had a fuse on there in order to protect the drive while I’m running it. This is just for demonstration purposes so I don’t actually have it fused. Also I’ll run my neutral. Now if I scroll down through this there’s a couple different options when it comes your 240 volt supply. Of course you’re just going to want to go with whatever one fits your supply that’s available to you at the time. They give you a couple options: the N01S, N02Y, N02S. That S and Y I’ve talked about in previous videos. It’s basically the difference between something that will accept only single-phase (thats the S) and [something] that will accept single-phase or a three-phase (which is the Y). So if you have any of the units that have NO2Y or NO1Y that means it’ll accept single-phase or three-phase as your input. If it has an S it means it will only accept single-phase. If has a T, it will only accept three-phase. So there’s three different options you could have there.

So if I scroll down we’re getting to that part now. If you have a three-phase drive then obviously it’s going to have a T or a Y, because a Y will accept three-phase or single phase and a T will accept three-phase only. That’s kind of true because you can actually technically wire a single-phase to a three-phase Drive but make sure you read or watch the video on Derating on our channel before you even attempt to do anything like that because you can damage the drive if you if you don’t properly derate the drive for a single-phase input when it’s normally rated for three-phase. So that’s pretty much it with your main supply. We’re going to get down to the fuse sizing here in a bit but there is a nice fusing chart right in the manual that tells you what size fuses to use, what wire sizes to use, and all that good stuff.

So now the motor connections are U, V and W of your motor leads. Your motor should have three leads and a ground right? So I got a U, V and a W, and notice the motor leads are on the left side of the drive. I’ve got U, V, W. This is on the left here. I’m not going to put my finger in there because it’s powered up. And then I have my ground in the middle. Of course my ground from my line side is also in the middle. So my ground is ground. And that’s pretty much all there is to wiring your motor to the drive. I’ve had this question asked a number of times before: can I use a single-phase motor on a variable frequency drive? Not on any of these. These are all for three-phase motors only. [This is] something very important to take into consideration when you’re sizing it.

Now let me go ahead and scroll all the way down to the actual wiring diagram or the fusing chart. The fusing chart on in the manual – if I pull it up it actually does it all based on part number. So when I pull up this part number on the side of my drive – it is ESV-371-N01-SXB. So then I just look that up here: ESV-371-N01-SXB. I follow that chart across to the right. I have a couple options here. I can use a 16 amp fuse, use a 15 amp breaker, 15 amp fuse, it even gives me a recommended part number for my fuse. It recommends a 14 gauge wire and I mean that’s pretty much all I need to know. Now the reason the fusing is a lot higher than the rated output current of the drive is because it’s rated for over-current. We usually recommend fast blow fuses. That’s going to be your ideal protection. Obviously a breaker is going to be a lot slower and reacting to an over-current situation, and standard fuses also can be a lot slower in reacting. The more time it takes for it to react the more potential damage can be caused to the drive as a result of whatever the overcurrent is.

Next section this is basic commissioning. So I’m not going to go through the details of the control terminals at this time because we’re not actually going to be doing a terminal strip Start/Stop control on this commissioning video. What we’re going to be doing is a basic keypad Start/Stop control and speed control. The control terminal as you can see on this kind of layout would be a standard wiring setup for a standard terminal strip based control of your drive. What would you use a terminal strip based control for? Perhaps you would actually want to run your Start/Stop on your drive from a remote push-button station. Or perhaps you’d want to run your speed from a speed pot rather than all of that running from your keypad. But well have to do other videos, or I will be doing other videos that kind of address those issues moving forward.

Now [lets] we look at a breakdown of those particular inputs and outputs. Again, I’m not going over that in this video. There is a chart in there that kind of elaborates what all of these terminal strip values actually represent on the terminal strip of your drive. We’re not going to be using the terminal strip at all. In fact you don’t even need anything on the terminal strip to commission the drive out of the box. You’re actually going to be surprised how little we’re going to do from a programming standpoint. I found it necessary to actually go over the keypad here. It does also show it on my manual but if I just do a quick overview here: the green button means go, the red button means stop. Forward and Reverse are a little tricky because when you press Forward and Reverse, I’m going to get an error. This is the default program. It comes setup for forward only. So you actually have to go into Parameter 110 in order to initiate or enable Forward and Reverse. The M is actually where you’re going to go to program something. So if I press M I can actually scroll up and down with the arrow keys see that scroll through the Parameters which are going to be later in the manual, and actually make changes using that M key or Enter key. Then I press M to change a value and I press M again to actually enable that value. For example if I was going to go to forward and reverse, which is 110, I can go up to Parameter 110, press Menu, change that to 1, press Menu again, and now my Forward and Reverse button – well maybe it isn’t 110. We’ll find out here momentarily, but Forward and Reverse button still aren’t working which means something’s weird with my program. So I’m going to take that 110 [and] I’m going to turn it back to zero. We’re going to double-check that here a little bit later.

So the only other buttons we got here are the up and down arrow keys. If it’s at the stop screen, the up and down [keys] will actually change your target speed, and that’s in Hertz. So out of the box if I use the up and down arrow keys, I can actually change my output speed before I even press the Start button. So that’s a real basic overview of the keypad. Not a whole lot there [and] not very complicated. At least it kind of goes into what the layout is, how to use it, and that kind of thing.

Now I’m going to come here into the Parameter Menu. Now this is like the lifeblood of your drive. This is where you actually get to be creative and flexible with how you want the drive to perform and operate for whatever your application is. Out of the box it’s set up for keypad control. You control the Start/Stop from the keypad, and you control the speed from the keypad. What’s kind of cool is, as you notice I really didnt make any changes to the program and out of the box I can actually just press the Start button. Look at that – we’ve got a spinning motor.

Notice it takes forever to get up to speed and it shows on my screen as it gets up to speed. That’s because the default acceleration and deceleration of the drive are 20 seconds. Now let me try the Forward and Reverse again Error. See? Still not working. So I’m going to have to set that up. So let that run for a second. We’re going to go through the Parameter Menu. We’re not going to change anything in the Start Control Source, we’re actually going to use the keypad for our Start control in this video.

Parameter 101 is the reference source or the speed. I’m still using the keypad for my speed so I’m going to leave that the same as well. If I go down to Parameter 102 and 103, I can change my minimum and maximum speeds. I can change that from 0 to 500 Hertz. Now of course you’re only going to go above 60 Hertz if your motors rated for more than 60 Hertz on the nameplate of it. Acceleration time and deceleration time are 104 and 105. So as we were talking about before it took a long time for it to start and it takes a while for it to stop. Now if I go into the menu and I go to Parameter 104, this is my acceleration, and I hold down the down arrow key, I can bring that down to like 3 seconds for example and press Start. Press Menu again to enter it then press Start. As you notice it got up to speeds substantially quicker right? So that’s the whole idea behind that. Now I can also do the same thing with deceleration. Deceleration can be reduced significantly. Something to take into consideration though is if you have a high inertial load – in other words like a lathe; something that’s very heavy – the faster you attempt to stop it the more energy that’s going to get pushed back up into the drive. The drive can fault out on something called a DC Bus Fault. A couple of ways to fix that is to obviously extend out your deceleration time and be a little more patient with it. It’s actually better on your drive to wait longer to stop. The other option is a dynamic braking module, which will actually absorb that extra energy that is coming out of it.

Next we want to make sure we look at our motor overload. Our motor overload is a very important value. Its in Parameter 108. This value is a percentage of your output current of your drive. I’m going to use hypothetical numbers in here because it’s all from basically 30 to 100 percent. So if you have a 10 amp drive and a 7 amp motor, you’re going to take your 7 amp motor, divided by 10 amps, which equals 7 or 0.7, and you’re going to multiply that by a hundred. So you get 70%. What you’re telling the drive is don’t output more than this much current because you’re to blow up my motor. Essentially what will happen is if it actually starts to exceed that amount the drive will trip on an overcurrent fault.

Let’s go down to this forward and reverse. It’s a probably the last thing we’re going to do here. See 110 was actually the Start method. So that’s that wasn’t the right place. I was confused with Parameter 112 which is rotation. We go into my Menu here. Parameter 112 – change that to 1. Press Start and here I am going forward. Here’s the goofy thing about Forward and Reverse control in the SMV. If I press Reverse notice it doesn’t do the Error, but there’s a little light here that’s actually flashing. While that is flashing you have to press ENTER to confirm your change in direction. So if I press Reverse again and then Enter, it stops and goes in the opposite direction. Imagine that.

So that is it. That is the basic commissioning of an SMVector Variable Frequency Drive. I hope this video was extremely helpful to you. As always, we sell and distribute all kinds of Variable Frequency Drives. The SMVector is one of our favorites because it’s very user friendly and it can accomplish a lot at a very reasonable price. Don’t forget to swing by our website: Precision-Elec.com, where you can actually size your VFD for your application. Also all of our prices include support so if you have any questions, feel free to ask us. I mean, I’m actually one of the guys on the Support Team here.

So until next time! I hope this video was helpful and stay tuned for more videos.

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