HowTo: How to Control a Mechanical Holding Brake with an Inverter Drive

There are a number of Inverter Drives available from our site with set-up parameters to control the relay output suitable for a motor mounted holding brake applied to a Hoist or out of balance load application.

A typical small AC supplied holding brake will take around 800ms to operate. A small DC supplied brake will take around 250ms to operate. Without this feature, a Variable frequency Inverter Drive may trip on over-current when starting or release the load during the 800ms delay.

To allow the drive to maintain control of the load during acceleration and deceleration and during the transition to stop, the inverter drive must operate the brake at some point before ramping up the motor speed when starting and before reaching zero speed when stopping. This means it is necessary to control the relay output at different levels and time delays for applying and releasing the brake.

The drives that have this feature are Parker SSD 650V, 690P and ABB ACS355. Set-up instructions can all be downloaded from the Manuals attached to the product entries on this site including:-

Parker SSD 650V Software Manual

  • Page 1-18 desribes the 'Brake Control' feature (you will need the DSE-Lite programming software to program this feature in this product).

Parker SSD 690PB Software Manual

  • Page 1-17 desribes the 'Brake Control' feature.

Parker SSD 690PV to K Software Manual

  • Page 1-17 desribes the 'Brake Control' feature.

ABB ACS355 Manual

  • Page 157 desribes 'Control of a Mechanical Brake' in the program features section.