It is summer. Over the next few months, you will be struggling to find ways to keep cool. You may toss extra ice cubes into a glass of lemonade, or purchase an oversized sunhat for garden work, or maybe consider a holiday to Antarctica. Unfortunately, you can’t keep your servo drive cool with a few cubes of ice and a floppy hat.
Summer heat can do serious damage to your Indramat servo drives. Heat failures can occur at any time of the year, but they are more likely to happen during the summer. That blazing summer sun ramps up factory temperatures as well as the risk of servo drive heat failures.
One of the most common heat related failures is servo fan or blower failure. Hotter temperatures means that the fan has to work even harder to maintain the correct temperature for servo drives and power supplies. The harder a fan has to work, the more likely it will fail.
Overheating can damage a servo drive, and at the very least shorten a drive’s lifespan. A drive without a fan can age as much as 56 times faster than a drive with a working fan.
So if you can’t just dump ice on your servo drive and top it off with a hat, what can you do to avoid heat failure?
Lower the factory temperature. Machinery generates heat, so there’s no avoiding a warm factory. However, you can make efforts to lower the ambient temperature as much as possible. Lower the AC, or find a way to improve air circulation.
Check the air conditioning units on your cabinets to make sure that they are working properly. This will help reduce the amount of work the servo fan has to do.
Calibrate temperature sensors. Improper temperature readings can force fans to work harder than need be, or not hard enough.
Inspect fans to ensure that they are working efficiently.
Perform regular cleanings and maintenance on fans, heat sinks, and all other accesible components.