Motors, Drivers, & Motion

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Summary 

In this webinar, SEW-Eurodrive Senior Product Application Engineer Jeremy McCullough breaks down motion control strategies, focusing on energy management and system architecture. The discussion explores how industrial automation systems can optimize energy consumption through peak shaving—reducing peak power demand during acceleration to lower electrical infrastructure requirements—and regenerative energy use, which reroutes or stores deceleration energy rather than dissipating it as waste heat through braking resistors.

McCullough explains the practical implementation of these strategies through shared dc bus architectures and local energy buffering. By linking multiple variable frequency drives (VFDs) or servo drives on a common dc link, multi-axis machinery, such as automated storage and retrieval system (ASRS) cranes, can share power between accelerating and decelerating axes or optimize shared power modules. Incorporating local energy storage, like capacitor banks, provides a buffering mechanism that supplies transient power surges locally, preventing grid-side power spikes, mitigating brief voltage sags and enabling controlled emergency stops during full power outages.

A discussion of data accessibility and software integration for predictive maintenance highlights how networked VFDs can serve as built-in sensors capable for capturing actionable metrics over industrial networks such as Profinet or EtherCAT to reveal mechanical wear trends over time. He details how SEW-Eurodrive supports these implementations through its MoviSuite engineering software and pre-built MoviKit modules, which allow engineers to easily configure grid power limits, charge modes and application-specific parameters with pre-sized engineering reports.