Science/Engineering/Technical forums

Jerry
I did tell you the controllers gave bursts of energy see previous posts

If you are using it on 115 volts the controller should work ok for however long
but we use 230 here and all controllers failed after a short time (after changing the internal links)
I think the designers made them for 115 with 230 volts being an afterthought and no american designer can get their head around 50Hz as apposed to 60Hz so some cooked the internal small xformer primary because of the wrong core laminations --a design co%^-up

Yeah, you did say they were pulsed, I just didn't think at 1hz! Just sounds weird.

I am running it off of 120 and I had planned on running it off of 240 but I will leave it as is now that you brought that up.

Yeah, using the 20% additional iron and copper to make 50 hz as sweet as 60 - that's money a lotta guys skip, figuring it will work, and if it doesn't the customer is far away....

Fried the drive (NT13) Still trying to figure out what was going on.

I switched it to 120 when I got it. I had been blowing fuses and then remember I had never upped the fuse size for the switch to 120 from 240. That seemed to solve the problem. Then I tried mounting the unit. Zap! Spark and fried another fuse. What the heck? Measured 160 volts DC on the case to the frame of the machine. Tried swapping hot and neutral thinking I had them backwards with the euro colored wires.

BAD IDEA.

Technically, it should have had not effect. But it smoked the power supply. Lost lots of logic ICs and see one of the mosfet drive transistor fried. Triple checked all wiring and it is right. Put a meager on the turbo and there are no shorts in the motor. Grounds test fine. I have no idea what is going on here. There should have not been any voltage to the frame of the machine, it was not plugged in and grounded and I checked it with a meter and it was isolated. Looks like I need to find another drive...

If you were seeing DC on the frame (or anyplace it shouldn't have been) then switching the wires wouldn't help. This indicates a likely short, probably at an active device/heatsink, since it was DC - and therefore in no way directly a line connection to either side.
But yeah, ouch.

Jerry
I have a shelf of
"sacrifices to the gods of high vacuum"
It has 11 of these controllers on it and only one TMP50 (buggered bearings) a Barden bearing product that is made exclusively for Leybold

I got another drive coming off ebay, one of the older NT50 drives. John, do you have one of those and if you do, do you know who made that circular 5 pin connector? The same connector was used on the older generation NT10 units before they switched to a Phoenix round connector.

If this drive fails I will probably be building a drive based off your schematic in the other thread.

Got the replacement drive and I now know what fried the drive. Kind of my fault. The drive has 5 wires to the turbo, 3 for the phases and two "shields". One goes to hard ground at the turbo, the second is just the shielding in the cable. Well, it turns out that shielding is connected to 160v. I must of had the two wires backwards and I was charging the entire machine to 160v. Amazing I didn't fry anything else. What an incredibly dumb idea, no warning at all in the manual that the shield is at high voltage.

Argh, got the new drive and it won't accelerate past base frequency. Tried two different pumps and same thing.

Big surprise, Leybold sent me the full schematics with waveforms and testpoints for the drive.