Industrial Engineer · phase 16 of 16
Regenerative Drive
Drive capable of returning braking energy from the DC bus to the AC supply.
The Explain card
- Plain English
- A regenerative drive can send braking energy from the DC bus back into the AC supply instead of burning it in a resistor. Its front end is an active converter that can push current in both directions.
- Example
- A downhill conveyor or a test dynamometer spends most of its time being driven by the load. A regenerative drive turns that into power the plant uses somewhere else.
- Why it matters
- Where braking is frequent or continuous, the resistor is a heater and the regenerative drive is a generator. The price, the added complexity, and the line side filtering only make sense when the energy returned is worth it, which a duty cycle calculation tells you.
- Hook
- Braking that pays you back.
Where it sits in the deck
Phase 16: VFD Related Drive Terms
The drive family's wider vocabulary, from soft starters and servo drives to the regenerative units people also call a drive.
