> On May 4, 2017, at 11:54 AM, Jon Elson via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org>
> wrote:
>
> ... But, you DO need a true sine wave source, and VFDs do not produce sine
> waves, they put out 400 V PWM waveforms that look fine to a motor, but not
> good at all to electronic loads.
I wonder how true that is. Consider that (for machines of this era) power
supplies are probably transformer input, to a rectifier and then a filter. The
transformer would smooth out the VFD output pulses, and whatever is left would
definitely be removed by the output filter. The only question I can see is
whether the rectifier diodes have enough reverse voltage margin to deal with
whatever peaks pass through the transformer. (The transformer itself certainly
will, given normal insulation design/test practice for power transformers.)
If the power supply is a swiching regulator, the details are slightly different
but the overall picture is similar. Then you begin with a rectifier, which
would have to be able to deal with the input spikes, followed by some amount of
filtering. Once past that I don't see any further issues.
An electronic circuit that looks at the incoming AC waveform directly would
certainly have issues with a VFD, but I can't think of too many examples of
that. A KW-11/L is one exception that comes to mind... :-)
paul
