What’s Wrong With Drive ?
Industrial electronics, including drives, have a certain lifetime – and the components do too! Aging components is the single most common reason for failure. Capacitors are often the first component to fail. Other likely failure culprits include resistors, diodes, IGBTs, driver ICs, relays, transistors, transformers, opto-isolators, and rectifiers, as well as others.
7 Signs of Servo Drive Failure
Many component failures in a servo drive are visible to the naked eye, even to the non-technical inspector. The circuit boards are often where the problems are. Failing components may still work but cause intermittent problems. Eventually they will fail completely leaving you in the lurch. Here are seven things to look for that tell you servo drive repairs are likely needed soon, if not immediately, for your drive to function optimally:
- Burned spots on the circuit boards
- Corrosion
- Leaking or bulging capacitors
- Component color change often due to overheating
- Component date codes that have expired or will soon
- Tarnish on leads
- Cracked resistors
What About the Invisible Problems?
Visual inspection is the first action to take. However, you may see nothing obviously wrong. So, what next? The next step requires the use of test equipment. Oscilloscopes and multi-meters can be used to test components to see if they are failing or out of spec for other reasons.