Cool Gadgets: Yaskawa F7 Variable Frequency Drive

It’s called “The Industrial Workhorse” because it can run just about anything, from 1/2 HP to 500 HP. Yaskawa’s F7 VFD gets a closer look from Innovative Automation’s Adam Ring.

Hi, Adam Ring here with another edition of Innovative Automations cool gadgets. This week we’re featuring the Yaskawa Electric Americas F7 Variable Frequency Drive and it’s made right here in the United States in Buffalo Grove, Illinoi. Factory really well known for its high quality procedures and standards that they live up to, it’s really quite a sight to see. Now this particular drives comes in ½ HP all the way up to 500HP, now this would be one of the babies here but we do also carry the really, really, big guys all the way up to 500HP. And they are available in both 240V as well as 480V versions depending on what your incoming power is.
So this drive is dubbed the industrial work horse and that’s because it can handle a wide array of various applications from simple fans and pumps to conveyors, to winder and unwanders, to even spindles. We’ve got different modes to allow you to set up the drive specifically for the different types of applications. We also will notice that on the design of the drive there is a split cover design. Which allows you to very easily get access to the terminals for wiring it up to your application without exposing any high voltage components, or potentially risking contact with a PC board where your screwdriver can slip and possibly damage it. You’ll also notice when I turn it on we’ve got a 5 line LCD display that actually displays in English or 1 of 7 different languages. It allows us to very easily go through and set up the parameters inside the drive. One of the neat things we can do with this is with a simple RJ45 cable we could remove this from the drive, plug in the cable, and now we can hold the drive in our hand and make the changes, very simply. Or with the same cable we can actually hook it to a PC with the drive wizard software that comes with every single unit and be able to save and set up the parameters as well as monitor the performance of the drive.
So we have various options available with the F7 Drive, we can communicate using ether net, device net, Profibus or Modbus, and depending on what your application calls for you could do custom software to specifically make this drive work with particular applications and plants called case software.
So if there’s one thing I can say about this drive it’s that I know that it is built with the upmost highest quality from installing several of these in my career, I can tell you from firsthand, and when you put this in application it just works. So one of the things is you get a 12 month warranty from the factory, if you let one of Innovative Automations support group members install this and set it up for you then that actually adds an extra 12 months to the warranty. So a pretty cool deal there, you might think about taking us up on that.
Now also depending on whether your buying this for a very simple application or a hard application this one drive will just do it all. So that’s the summary of the F7 drive for Yaskawa America. We’ll see you next time on Innovative Automations cool gadgets.

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source https://gadgetsteam.com/2019/04/21/cool-gadgets-yaskawa-f7-variable-frequency-drive/