New Industry Products

Eaton Expands Family of Drive Products

January 24, 2006 by Jeff Shepard

Eaton Corp. has expanded its line of drives with new models that combine powerful software and innovative hardware modularity. The new drive products include the HVX9000 series drives with IntelliPass bypass, the CPX9000 Adjustable Frequency Drive, and the new BACNET adapter, a networking system that enables Eaton Cutler-Hammer drives to support a variety of communication protocols.

At the heart of the HVX9000 series is the HVX IntelliPass. The IntelliPass bypass incorporates Cutler-Hammer Intelligent Technologies (IT), enclosed control and circuit breaker expertise. The patented IntelliPass is designed around the new Cutler-Hammer HVX9000 Drive and incorporates the highly successful IT product family. The IT features, functions, and form enable the drive and bypass to become an integrated design.

Control of the drive and bypass is accomplished with the drive keypad, eliminating the need to add additional lights and switches to the enclosure itself. The IntelliPass features industry-exclusive redundant control power sources for the bypass logic, ensuring redundancy and providing additional ride-through capability.

The next generation HVX9000 series drives are specifically engineered for HVAC, pump, and fluid control applications. Each drive includes a circuit breaker or fuse disconnect that provides flexible drive isolation configurations, and a lightweight design that simplifies and speeds the installation process, lowering contractor's costs. A serial communication interface enables control of the motor operated by the drive or bypass and additional I/O and communication cards provide plug and play functionality.

Eaton has also released the CPX9000 Clean Power Drive. The Drive uses an advanced 18-pulse, clean power technology that significantly reduces line harmonics at the drive input terminals, resulting in the purest sinusoidal waveforms available. The CPX9000 Clean Power Drives include smaller enclosures and higher temperature ratings than the previous CP9000 for selected drives. The CPX9000 Drive delivers a near unity factor, which prevents transformer overheating and overloading of breakers and feeders, enabling the application of these drives on generators and other high impedance power systems.

New to the family of HVAC drives is the BACNET adapter. BACNET is a non-proprietary, open communication standard that has popular HVAC applications. It uses RS-485 to implement MS/TP (Master Slave/Token Passing). A collection of analog and binary value objects are supported to provide easy access to common drive parameters such as control, status, speed, current, and power. The board is optically protected to provide 500 VDC isolation and supports 9.6 to 38.4 k-baud communication speeds. The BACNET adapter will be available in February 2006.