Industrial Engineer · phase 9 of 16 · noun
Enclosure Rating
NEMA Type or IP code describing the environmental protection provided by the drive enclosure.
The Explain card
- Plain English
- The enclosure rating is a code for how well the drive's case keeps out dust, water and fingers. NEMA types in North America, IP codes elsewhere, and a drive carries one or the other.
- Example
- A NEMA 1 or IP20 drive is an open chassis meant to live inside a cabinet. A NEMA 4X or IP66 drive can be bolted to a wall in a washdown area and hosed.
- Why it matters
- An open drive mounted on a wall in a dusty plant fills with grit and fails, and a sealed drive inside a sealed cabinet has nowhere to send its heat. The rating decides where the drive can live and what cooling it needs.
- Hook
- How much of the world the drive is built to keep out.
Word knowledge
How the word is built, where it came from, and what it sits beside in memory.
In a sentence
Before mounting the VFD beside the washdown conveyor, the engineer checked the enclosure rating against the area's cleaning conditions.
Why these words
- enclosure Old French enclore, to surround or confine identifies the housing being classified
- rating English rate plus -ing, from Medieval Latin rata, fixed amount signals an assigned classification
Where it came from
- Origin
- English compound formed from enclosure and rating
- Entered the language
- 20th century
- What changed
- Enclosure moved from the act of surrounding to the resulting housing, while rating developed from assessment into an assigned technical class.
How it is spelled
- Pattern
- enclosure keeps the clos spelling found in close and closure
- Pattern
- rating drops the silent e of rate before the suffix -ing
Spelled like
- closure
- disclosure
- coding
- sizing
Broken into chunks
-
enclos
- enclose
- closure
- disclose
-
rat
- rate
- rated
- rating
What it sits beside
Same subject
- NEMA Type
- IP code
- ingress protection
- VFD cabinet
Same shape
- voltage rating
- current rating
- interrupting rating
equipment ratings
- voltage rating
- current rating
- enclosure rating
compound technical nouns
- control circuit
- motor starter
- fault code
Where it sits in the deck
Phase 9: VFD Ratings, Sizing, and Motor Data
Nameplate arithmetic, where the currents, voltages and duty ratings decide whether a drive can actually run the motor you bolted it to.
