Detect Automation Control and Drive Faults Before They Disrupt Operations

In automated environments, control system faults often develop silently until a trip or shutdown forces investigation, making early signs of automation control and drive degradation difficult to detect.

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the importance

Why This Failure Mode Gets Expensive Fast

Automation control and drive faults are a common cause of unplanned downtime in highly automated environments. Missed early warning signs often lead to:

Sudden or intermittent line stoppages
Smoke, heat, and burning odors
Emergency troubleshooting under time pressure
False PLC alarms and nuisance trips
Drive or controller failure
Increased risk and liability during energized inspections

early warnings

Failure Reality

Automation control and drive faults rarely occur without warning. These systems degrade long before they fault. Early signs of automation control and drive degradation are often subtle and inconsistent.

When VFDs, PLC cabinets, or MCCs begin to experience issues, teams often notice:

Intermittent faults or unexplained resets
Minor process instability, flow changes or unexplained SCADA behaviour
Occasional overheating warnings

By the time a drive trips or a controller faults, internal thermal or electrical stress has often been present for weeks. Internally, teams describe this as:

“It just started faulting.”
“Nothing changed.”
“It reset and ran again.”
“I think the code has an issue.”
“There’s something causing sensor jam signals, but they seem false.”

OUR SOLUTION

Where MultisensorAI Helps

Multisensor AI provides continuous condition insight that helps teams see early signs of control and drive degradation before trips, faults, or shutdowns occur.

It complements PLCs and SCADA systems by adding condition context, without replacing existing control logic.

how it works

How Early Threat Detection Works

Before a control fault occurs, subtle changes emerge. These changes often appear days or weeks before a drive or controller trips.

Uneven heat distribution inside electrical cabinets
Environmental stress from dust, airflow, or load variation
Gradual thermal rise at terminals or drives
Comparative analysis to distinguish normal from early degradation

Single-point alarms miss these patterns, even though they are often visible well before failure. Understanding where and how heat develops with a solution like MSAI Connect is key to early awareness.

Maintenance Equipment Optimization

Extending Component Life Without Over-Maintaining

Electrical and drive components rarely fail on a predictable schedule. Without early condition insight, maintenance teams are forced into conservative or inconsistent replacement decisions.

Common challenges include:

This is especially common in:

Drives replaced early due to uncertain thermal stress

VFD cabinets supporting variable-speed conveyors
Cabinets serviced uniformly despite uneven loading

PLC panels exposed to heat, dust, or airflow constraints
Preventive maintenance applied broadly instead of where degradation is actually occurring

MCCs operating under fluctuating electrical loads

Extending component life requires understanding which components are experiencing thermal or electrical stress, how quickly conditions are changing, and under what operating circumstances — rather than relying solely on time-based maintenance intervals.

Labour Effectiveness

Reducing Reactive Work Caused by
Automation Control & Drive Faults

When early signs of control and drive degradation go undetected, maintenance work becomes reactive by default.

Teams often encounter:

Emergency troubleshooting following unexplained events
Repeated investigation of intermittent faults
Skilled labor diverted from planned work to urgent response

This reactive cycle consumes maintenance capacity without improving reliability. Reducing reactive work depends on identifying degradation trends before faults occur, allowing teams to plan interventions, align parts availability, and apply technical expertise where it delivers lasting value.

Health & Safety

Managing Heat and Friction
Before They Create Exposure

Heat is one of the earliest and most reliable indicators of stress inside automation control systems. As drives, terminals, and electrical components degrade, localized temperature increases often appear long before alarms or trips occur.

Proactively managing heat and electrical stress helps teams reduce the likelihood of hazardous failures, shifting work from urgent, high-risk interventions to controlled, lower-exposure maintenance.

If these conditions are not addressed early, they can lead to:

Component overheating or failure
Increased risk during energized cabinet inspections
Greater safety exposure during emergency repair scenarios

Asset & Environment Examples

Seeing This Gap In Your Operations?

Why are automation control and drive faults hard to detect early? Because most monitoring approaches focus on events, not degradation trends.

Control and drive issues often appear as downstream effects rather than root causes. They appear normal. Until they aren’t.

Automation control faults are commonly missed because:

Internal cabinet conditions aren’t continuously visible

PLC alarms trigger intermittently or only at protection thresholds
Thermal buildup is uneven and localized

Manual inspections can’t see inside energized cabinets

Why This Failure Is Commonly Missed

What happens if you miss it

When early signs of control and drive degradation go unnoticed, failures rarely arrive cleanly or predictably.

Teams are often left dealing with:

Sudden or intermittent line stoppages that disrupt throughput
Emergency troubleshooting under production pressure
False PLC alarms and nuisance trips that mask the real issue
Increased safety exposure during energized cabinet inspections
Overheated drives or damaged electrical components

In many cases, the initial issue is small — localized heat, airflow restriction, or electrical imbalance - but the impact escalates quickly once a fault occurs. Missing early warning signs shifts control system maintenance from planned intervention to reactive response, increasing downtime, labour strain, and operational risk.

faq

Frequently Asked Questions

What causes drive and control faults?

Drive and control faults are commonly caused by thermal stress, airflow issues, electrical imbalance, loose connections, and sustained load conditions.

Why don’t PLCs or alarms catch control and drive degradation earlier?

PLCs and alarms are designed to trigger at defined protection thresholds, not to detect gradual thermal or electrical degradation developing over time.

Is cabinet temperature enough to monitor?

Overall temperature helps, but localized hotspots often matter more.

What causes VFDs to trip unexpectedly?

VFDs commonly trip due to overloading, age-related component wear, loose or degraded connections, and sustained operation outside design limits.

What are early signs of electrical cabinet failure?

Early signs of electrical cabinet failure include uneven heat distribution, localized hot spots, electrical harmonics, and abnormal current fluctuations.