Lubrication of variable speed drives

Elke, you might want to look at a product from Dropsa. They have an air/oil system that will dispense a very small amount of any oil at a contant rate and could be done through out the speed range of the drive. I would be hesitant to lubricate this drive with grease because of the speed. If you are running at 3000 RPM for any length of time, you might start developing bearing problems because of the viscous drag that the grease can have in the bearings. With the air oil system you would be putting oil in all the time, or enough to maintain the film required to lubricate the bearing with out the heat and friction/drag that can be there with the grease.

If you want more info on this I have lots of real world experience using this product in many applications with tremendous results. Depending on what kind of system you have, it may be a very quick and simple fix / adder.

Dean.

Dean, our fixed speed electric motor bearings are manually regreased during operation at 3000 rpm (without any problems). For our variable speed motors we recommend to reduce the speed during regreasing. We would like to avoid this speed reduction for the VSD and re-grease at any given speed. I'm looking for any information on the lubrication of high speed electrical motors. The grease we use now is recommended by the motor suppliers, changing that will be a bigger challenge then changing the re-greasing rpm.

Hi Elke,

Pls visit www.memolub.be and look for the distributor in your area.

Regards,
Danny