WEG CFW500 PID Pump Genius Simplex: Part 2 of 3 from AutomationDirect

In Part 1, we reset the drive to factory default and reset the SoftPLC to factory default. We then set up the motor parameters, built a Pump Genius for our specific drive and downloaded it to the drive. In this video, we’ll configure the parameters for the Pump Genius. The good news is the Pump Genius is very capable. The bad news is that means there are a lot of parameters to configure. The good news is, WLP has a Pump Genius wizard that walks us through it one little step at a time. If you haven’t done so already, double click over here to bring up that wizard. We see this is a simplex version of the Pump Genius – that is, we are only using one motor and pump. Next. First, we set up the local and remote speed reference and control inputs. In the PID Quick Start videos, we used remote only so we’ll do that here too. In remote mode when we are running the Pump Genius, the SoftPLC will control the speed reference, we don’t care about forward and reverse so I’ll set it to not used, and run/stop will be controlled by a digital input. Next dialog. We’ll use the default Digital Input 1 to control run/stop – which is what we did in the PID Quick Start video. We also used Digital Input 2 to control the auto/manual mode of PID. But the Pump Genius doesn’t allow that. You have to use Digital Input 3. We changed that wire on our test set in Part 1. We didn’t use any other inputs and we didn’t use any outputs in the PID Quick Start videos. You would normally set the outputs to drive a process running light, a fault beacon, or one of the fault conditions. We’ll just turn those off for now. Next. Here we set up our ramp times. You want to keep those as short as is reasonable so they don’t interfere with PID's ability to do it’s thing. In the Quick Start videos, we used .2 seconds which was something you would probably never use, but we’ll do that here to keep things as similar as possible to those Quick Start videos. Also as we explained in the PID Quick Start videos, these min and max values are really important. Mostly make sure the min speed is a little above where the pump stops pumping and the max speed is the motor speed that max’s out your sensor. This is what we used in the PID Quick Start videos. You can watch those videos to find out why. Next. The process variable is coming in on Analog Input 1. Next. Tell Analog Input 1 he is the process variable, we’re using a 0-10 volt sensor, our units are psi, and we’ll use 1 decimal point. Don’t forget to make sure the DIP switch on the I/O module is set to volts. This is where you set up the analog input. We don’t need an offset, gain of 1 is good, and I always like to add a little filtering – just keep it small or it will make PID less responsive. These go with the min and max speed we set back here. So, when the motor runs from the min to max speed, our sensor runs from zero to 15 psi. Notice this uses our engineering units. This is what PID uses to calibrate all of its calculations so make sure you get this right. Again, see the PID Quick Start video for more info on that. Next. This is a forward or direct PID loop. That is, the pressure goes up when the motor speed goes up. Reverse would be like a cooling system, where the process variable – the temperature – goes down when the motor speed goes up. Next. Do we want the Pump Genius to always run automatically, control it manually or use a digital input to switch between the two? We used a digital input to switch between automatic and manual modes in the PID Quick Start so that’s what we’re doing here. This just says use the digital input we assigned in Parameter 265 back in the second dialog to control this switch. So Digital Input 3 will decide if we send the PID result or a value that we manually set out to the drive. This is the bumpless mode we talked about in the PID Quick Start. We’ll leave that off again, but in most applications you will usually want to enable it. Check out the bumpless videos to learn more about that. We’ll use the Pump Genius default coefficients which are a little different from what we used in the previous PID Quick Start videos. And we’ll start the manual setpoint at 0 Hertz so we aren’t surprised when we turn this thing on. Next. We want the setpoint to be controlled by the drives keypad – which can also be controlled by a network write. Next. We want to use the same 6 psi setpoint as the quick start. Again, that’s in engineering units. By the way, if you mess up on any of these dialogs, there’s a handy default button down here which will reset that dialog. I’ve used that more than once … and hit Next. We’ll skip sleep mode for this demo. There’s a whole separate video on that if you want to learn more. It’s great for tank filling applications or any time you want PID to sleep until there is demand. Since we aren’t using that we skip the sleep mode configuration dialogs and go from this Dialog 11 all the way to Dialog 14 where can add pipe charging. If enabled, it will turn the motor on like this for this much time to pre-fill the pipes before reverting to PID control. This is common in irrigation systems or if you just need to prime your system. You can also specify a maximum amount of amps allowed during pipe charging so you don’t overload your system during this time. We won’t be doing pipe charging in this demo, so we hit Next. Here we can set up our high and low-level alarms. Normally, you would want to set the high alarm below the pipes burst pressure and the low alarm to whatever your system needs. You’ll get an alarm when either happens and after the time specified you’ll get a fault and the drive will shut down. For this demo, we’ll disable the faults by leaving their times set at zero. And make sure the alarms are beyond our zero to 15 psi range just to keep things simple. Next. You can set up a dry pump alarm. That is if the motor speed revs up or the torque drops because there is no load, issue an alarm and after so many seconds, issue a fault and shut the system down. We’ll disable that by setting these beyond the min and max speeds we set in the third dialog and leaving the fault time at zero seconds. You can also have an external sensor – maybe something that is detecting low suction for example – and if that sensor which is normally closed opens, then you get an alarm and some time later get a fault that shuts the system down. We’ll leave that disabled. You can also do that with an analog input. We’ll skip that too which allows us to skip a few more dialogs. You can derag the pump on startup, a digital input, or if clogging is detected. Deragging automatically reverses the motor to clean off the impeller. That’s primarily for waste-water applications. We’ll leave that off. We want the setpoint on the first line of the display, the process variable on the second line and the current in amps on the last line. And we’re done configuring the Pump Genius parameters! I like to drag to select this parameter summary, copy it and paste it into a document so I have a written record of all the parameter values. You can also print it to all the usual places including PDF. Hit Finish and it asks you if you want to send the values to the drive. Sure. And of course, remember to save the project so you don’t lose everything you’ve done. Ok, in Part 1 we put the Pump Genius app in the drive and in this part we configured the parameters. The drive is ready to go. Join me in Part 3 where we will do a live demo of the Pump Genius in operation. 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