I am working on a shredder design at the moment that is a little different than most others, its based on the small Filamaker shredder that Marek Patel has copyright free Cad designs for on his website :
I am looking for a way to auto reverse a motor if it gets jammed for a specific amount of time before going forward again. Is there a way of doing this ?
My setup – (plan only @ this stage) 5.5kw motor on a VFD geared at 23 rpm (It will have a 1667 Nm of torque roughly, as not only am I shredding plastic but also waste wood and tin cans etc) or a hydraulic 7.5kw motor with adjustable speed depending on flow rate.
The shredder is constructed out of 21mm steel and the blades are made from 21mm hard faced steel (or Hardox – not decided yet)
The danger is if it gets jammed …it can break the drive shaft.
I was thinking if the RPM drops below x amount it would reverse for 5 sec then go forward ? or like mentioned it jams and auto reverses
Just a £1 micro-controller (not even an arduino) and two relays to start/stop & reverse the motor.
I’m using a single phase motor so don’t need a VFD. VFDs can monitor the load and be programmed to shut down above a certain limit, I’m not aware of any with a reverse/clear function (there may be), but you could certainly use a micro-controller to control the VFD either directly via the start/direction inputs, or most have some sort of serial interface.
andyn, very clever way to controll the load on the shredder. Please could You explain a bit more : what type of hardware are you using to controll it ?
Are You using some kind of logic controller like Simens Logo ?
Or do You know cheaper way ?
Best wishes .
and thanks in froward.
I am not sure if vfd’s can be programmed re parameters…
### update… so I am looking into using arduino code… Need to do research but appears the motor can be controlled in so many ways with this and with relative drivers / sensors
Yes I did something similar, I put an encoder on the free end of the non-driven shaft, it’s just a disc with slots in it and an IR light beam, you can see it at 3.37 on the video. My machine is small and can withstand the force of a jam, so if it doesn’t receive a pulse from the encoder approx every second, it knows a jam has occurred and to reverse the motor, there is no sensing of the actual load or RPM, but with more accurate measurement of the pulse train I would be able to detect when a jam is about to occur before it actually happens.
Yes the filamaker shredder design looks very similar to mine, I didn’t base my machine on any particular design, but I may have seen this machine and other similar ones when I was looking for inspiration.