A servo drive flies with Zeppelin

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Drive Technology | Applications

Daniel Kappmeyer | 25.03.2021

COMBIVERT S6 takes off

Frequency converter in an airship? Sounds unusual, but it's not so far-fetched. The experts from KEB Automation support the company Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik – ZLT – in the development of innovative and new concepts. ZLT equips special applications with S6 servo drives, which can show off its strengths as a modular system particularly well here.

The servo drive also shows its capabilities at lofty heights: "The lightweight and very compact design of the KEB drive in book format allows it to be used even where every gram of excess weight is important. The freedom to operate the S6 on a three-phase AC voltage supply as well as on a DC voltage supply makes the place of use extremely flexible," explains KEB applicator Sebastian Wietzorrek.

"Our customers also appreciate the integrated safety functions, which are available on a modular basis," says Wietzorrek. Every Generation 6 drive comes with Safe-Torque-Off (STO) as standard. Furthermore, depending on the control card, a variety of encoder-based but also encoderless safety functions* are available.

“THE PERFECT PACKAGE OF PERFORMANCE AND FUNCTION”

In the pump application, Zeppelin uses a very special AC motor, which can be commissioned in just a few steps with an S6 servo drive and the commissioning wizard of the COMBIVIS 6 software. Due to the very good overload behaviour of the drive with over 200 percent for a full 60 seconds, there is sufficient reserve available even during power peaks and fluctuations.

Among the various control options, all common bus systems are available, but simple control via digital and analogue I/Os is also possible. In this project, the S6 itself takes over part of the logic links and thus enables, for example, automatic switching between various power levels in order to adapt the power reduction to external conditions – such as temperature curves. In addition, the COMBIVIS 6 commissioning tool offers detailed monitoring, which enables precise optimisation of functional processes during commissioning.

KEB does not leave its customers alone in this phase. A broad team consisting of technicians and engineers, specialised in various industrial sectors, supports the application up to the series machine. Georg Groeger, Electronics Development at Zeppelin, adds: "We would like to take this opportunity to thank KEB for the excellent cooperation. For us, this project was completely new territory, so we were glad to have the back for the main functions."
"But not only in the air, especially in a conventional control cabinet, the S6 is in its element," says Sebastian Wietzorrek. "I think we've put together the perfect package here from performance and range of functions, which is easy to commission and has already been used for years in diverse and demanding industrial applications."