Long-distance diagnostics point to simple repair
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Yaskawa Engineering Europe product story
Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team
Nov 28, 2005
When the RRS James Clark Ross developed a problem with an onboard inverter, it was the technical team at Yaskawa Engineering Europe in the UK that came to the rescue from 4000km away.
When the UK's principal survey vessel, the RRS James Clark Ross, sailing just off the Greenland Ice Sheet, developed a problem with an onboard inverter, it was the technical team at Yaskawa Engineering Europe in the UK that came to the rescue from 4000km away.
The vessel, which can be in polar seas for months at a time uses three generator sets driven by Yaskawa inverters.
When one developed a "DC bus overvoltage" fault it was a potentially very serious problem.
The ship bristles with electronic navigational and scientific equipment and stabilised voltage supplies from the generators are critical.
The Yaskawa inverter had begun to spuriously shut down and since the drives have such a track record of reliability, there was no spare on board and no chance of getting one out to the stricken ship.
However, the Chief Engineer of the RSS James Clark Ross was able to e-mail fault trace readings to the Yaskawa team.
Detailed analysis of the readings lead Yaskawa Engineering's experts to suggest other checks to make and enabled him to establish that the inverter's trip problem did not lie with the DC bus.
A further fault trace was sent to Yaskawa and from this new data two possibilities emerged: the inverter's base driver control board was failing, although this was thought unlikely; or that the encoder was faulty.
The Chief Engineer quickly discovered that the encoder was the culprit and was able to fit a replacement simply.
Yaskawa Engineering's Olaf Leijdekker summed up the service saying: "The value of technical support is never clearer than when a mission critical problem arises".
"While this example is unusual, it is common for the Yaskawa team to assist users and save them both time and money".
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