Teardown of a ABB DCS401.0900 DC motor drive. It can output an insane 900A at variable voltages, for a maximum output power of 522 kW! A very modular design by ABB, that makes almost no difference on the 2- or 4-quadrant versions of this drive.
You love motor drives, inverters, variable frequency drives and all like it. You are in luck, for check out all these other teardowns of power electronics that I have done! Telemechanique Altivar 58, 10kW Motor Drive Teardown. Omron/Yaskawa 3 kW AC Servo Drive Teardown – Isolation, Day 34. Teardown of Danfoss VLT6000 4kW Variable Frequency Drive. Teardown – Schneider Electric frequency inverter ALTIVAR71. or Kone elevator 45 kW motor drive teardown
Inside the ABB DCS400
The interior design consists of 5 different function parts. Heat sink with fan. SCR bridge with busbars. SCR driver board. DC motor excitation coil control and a main controller board with network interface.
The controller board, SDCS-CON-3A, is populated by a lot of 74HC series IC’s. D2000 seems to be the main controller, a Renesas H8/3048 8-bit single chip microcomputer. The memory is D1800 and D1801 Cypress CY62128 1 Mbit RAM and D1802 AMD AM29F010B 1 Mbit Flash memory. The ABB DRIVES IOCC-2B 82000561 marked Atmel controller sitting at D800, seems to be a secondary microcontroller 8-bit, 8051 CPU, 30 MHz.
The driver board, SDCS-PIN-3B, is fully populated for a 4-quadrant drive, but as it can be seen with the red and yellow wires, the gate connectors are only for 2-quadrant.
DC Motor Driver Power Electronics
The large SCR bridge, of the ABB DCS400, consists of 3 Proton-Electrotex MT3-595-18-A half-bridge modules. Each SCR module is rated for 595A mean on-state current at 1600V. It can handle up to around 20kA surge on-state current at up to 10 ms! This bridge feeds the armature of the DC motor.
Certain types of DC motors needs a shunt or field excitation to control direction and speed. A 522 kW DC motor certainly needs that! This circuit is used to power the field coil.
A 522 kW drive needs some serious cooling. A 127W Ebmpapst W2E250-HL06-10 at 230VAC 50Hz.
Best of all is a good electrical potential difference, the electrical power system is quite simple.