Broens Industries came to CNC Design with an enquiry many months ago to supply Siemens electric motors, drives and control equipment for a machine to test automotive diffs, “to destruction”. We also assisted with the electrical engineering for this machine.

Left: Original "4 Square" tester. Right: New Broens diff tester.

The machine consists of inter-changeable fixtures which allow all Dana's various models to be tested, while the interface developed allows easy configuration of test parameters.

The machine consists of three 500kW Siemens 1PL6 motors, controlled by Siemens Masterdrive VC drives, Siemens S7-300 PLC and a Siemens MP370 HMI screen.  The System is designed to perform all the tests that were carried out by the previous machine, plus some additional tests that could not be performed, due to test rig constraints.   The new machine captures and stores to HDD, all the results during the test at 1 second intervals.  Most tests run for a minimum 8 hour period, or “to destruction”, whichever comes first.

Even though there are 3 * 500kW motors, because of the configuration (1 * input, 2 * load) the actual power consumption of the machine is less than 100kW.

The size of the drives meant that the electrical cabinet was almost as big as the machine itself. 

For futher information and inquiry on similar machine, please contact:

Ken Sheehan
CNC Design - Sydney
Phone +61 2 9737 8259
Fax +612 9737 8260