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A Unique “Wire Feed” Solution Using Two Baldor H2 Drives

September 1, 2006

Centrilift Cable, in Tulsa, OK, an affiliate of Baker Hughes Company, makes cables for underground pumping equipment. Cable made by Centrilift is packaged together with the Baker Hughes pumping equipment providing customers with a matched assembly product and a ready-made accessory source.

In the manufacturing area at Centrilift, several different cable handling machines are used, which includes an assortment of wire draw machines, some wire coating machines, and equipment that will do the spooling of the wire. To increase productivity, Centrilift decided to study its spooling operations to make the process easier for the operator and to make improvements where technicians provided information manually.

In the past, Centrilift used a PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) to control the lapping of wire on the spool. The operator would manually dial in a width and speed, and thus the PLC would send down 0-10V signals to the controls to determine the winder speed and the traverse action. This approach was labor intensive for the technician, who had to use charts and tables and make calculations to input different wire sizes to the Logic Controller. Using the drives expertise of the Baldor Tulsa Office, and the vast experience provided by Harold Eastin of Centrilift, and Matt Asbill of Motion Industries, Centrilift took on the challenge of simplifying the spooling system by taking advantage of the ratio feature in the Baldor Vector drive.

A Baldor H2 vector drive was installed to control the line speed and the dancer arm on the spool. A second H2 drive was installed to control the traverse motion (wire moving through the guide), which is motion that is dependent upon the line speed coming from the first drive. The second drive reads the new wire speed from the first drive and automatically calculates the ratio required for the speed of the traverse motion after the technician inputs to the drive the proper cable width. Because both drives work “in sync” with each other, the wire is moved across the spool uniformly and smoothly.

According to Harold Eastin of Centrilift, “this simplifies the method of determining the correct wire speed and feed ratio. Using Baldor’s two drives in tandem lets us remove the PLC programming steps and do away with a lot of extra hook-up wires.”

Bill Hunt, Drives Specialist with the Baldor Tulsa Office said, “We usually think of adding more intelligence by using touch screens and PLCs, but in this case that just added difficulty. At Centrilift, we used Baldor’s drive technology to do a ratio function required in this application.” Working with Harold Eastin of Centrilift, Matt Asbill of Motion Industries, who did the installation and setup commented, “We usually are adding PLCs and throwing away relays. In this case we removed both. In this new installation, Centrilift is seeing better than a 25% increase in productivity using Baldor H2 Vector drives and Baldor Vector Duty motors.”

The new H2 Vector Drives with new PID loops and electronic gearing provided a less complex and easier to operate solution for this customer. For more information about Baldor motors and drives, contact a District Office near you.