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

In Part 1, we loaded the Pump Genius app into the drives SoftPLC. In Part 2, we configured the parameters and now in Part 3, it’s time to do a live demo. In the PID quick start videos we used the remote HMI for the live demos because it gave us a much better view of the PID process than the drive' s built-in HMI. But, because the remote HMI uses a serial port and we’re using that serial port to connect WLP to the drive, and the I/O module that comes with the drive only has one RS485 port, we don’t have an extra serial port for the remote HMI. You might ask – now that the drive has all the parameters, why not just unplug the PC and plug in the remote HMI? It gives us a better view of what’s going on, so why not use it? Well, because the Pump Genius has tons of amazing dialogs for monitoring the status of your system – way better than the remote HMI. So instead of using the remote HMI, we are going to leave the computer plugged into the RS485 port on the drive, so we can see how those monitoring dialogs work. If we go to Parameter 1000, we see it’s set to a 3 which tells us the currently installed app isn’t running. Remember, we skipped that step in Part 1 just so we could remind you here to check to make sure the app is running. You can also check Parameter 1003 to see if it’s a user app that’s been loaded, and not the resident app built into the drive. So, we’ll go to Parameter 1001 and set it to a 1 to run the Pump Genius app. Back in Parameter 1000 we see it’s now a 4 which tells us the app is running. Let’s go for it. We’ll put it in automatic mode and switch to run. And in a matter of a second or two, the Pump Genius has our system running at 6 psi. That’s all there is to it! If we change the load, the drive automatically adjusts the speed of the motor to compensate and hold the pressure at 6 psi regardless of how many valves we open or close. Perfect. Exactly what we expected. Let’s bring up the overview dialog where we can see at a glance our setpoint, the actual system pressure, what the motor’s doing and various status lights and alarms. That’s way more than we could see with the remote HMI! You can see what your digital I/O s are doing - let’s see if the auto manual switch is driving Digital Input 3 - yep. We can see the analog I/Os, and how our ramps and speeds are set up. You can see your process variable in both engineering units - psi in our case - and percent. That’s cool! You can see exactly how your PID controller is set up and even adjust those gains while your system is running. The version of WLP I’m using has a bug that shows these scaled by a factor of 10. That will probably be fixed by the time you see this video - WEG is very responsive with software updates. Just make sure you have the most recent version which you can download for free from AutomationDirect.com. If we switch to manual mode, the pump stops because we preset the manual speed at zero. If we change that to 30 hertz and give it a second - yep the pump manually goes to that value and generates the corresponding pressure. Manual mode gives you total control over the drive’s output which is great for those times when you need to verify or test things independent of the PID loop. I’ll switch it back to auto mode and the drive automatically adjusts the motor speed to get the system back to 6 psi. There are dialogs for monitoring sleep mode, boost, pipe charging, etc. We can view and modify our alarms. I’ll move the low alarm to above our current pressure. Yep, got an alarm but we won’t get a fault because this is set to zero. Let’s put that back to get rid of the alarm. So, there’s basically a dialog for every part of the Pump Genius operation. So not only does the Pump Genius walk you through the entire parameter configuration process that we did in the previous video, but it also gives you complete view and control over everything you could possibly want to know about how your pumping system is operating. How cool is that? Notice that every dialog shows you all the parameter numbers for each function. You can simply use that as a guide to make the changes manually yourself on the drive or make the change right here in the dialog. Regardless, The Pump Genius makes it super easy to monitor and change or tweak your pumping systems operation. And all we did was: configure the motor which you would do anyway, build a pump genius app for our specific drive and firmware version and download that to the drive, walk through the pump genius parameter configuration and download that to the drive. And it just worked. Man, I love that. And if it didn’t work we have tons of dialogs we can use to debug it. Very cool. That ought to be enough to get you started with the pump genius. Click here to learn more about the CFW500 variable frequency drive. Click here to learn about AutomationDirect’s Free support options and click here to subscribe to our YouTube channel so you will be notified when we publish more videos like this one.