Motors with oil contamination IRB7600-340/2.8

What version controller? Are the motors Elmo motors?

S4C, S4C+, IRC5 are examples of controller version, would give me indication of age. I asked about the motors because there was a widespread problem years ago with Elmo motors having leaky seals. As best I can remember being told. Elmo had changed the seal without OK from ABB and ABB had to go out and replace many motors because of that. They later ceased using Elmo motors.

OK, the times of which I spoke was a generation before IRC5. But you seem to be having leaky seals nonetheless.

I've seen TMO contaminated with incompatible oil get past the motor front seal.

I would inspect the oil in the suspect cavities

While it generally depends on the load and programmed motion, I would expect temps in the 35-50°C range if the ambient temp is in the 25-30°C range.

Besides mechanical/lubrication issues and external heat transferred to the motor, less than optimal programming techniques can also be a large contributor.

The problem you have with the oil getting in to the motor and finally the brakes is a very common issue on the IRC5 robots.

One of our shops had about 800 robots and over the period of 7 years we changed about 3,000 motors and roughly 600-700 Axis 2 and axis 3 gearbox's due to this issue. Early on ABB would not give us any help with this issue and kept telling us we were the only customer having trouble. At around the 2 year mark we discovered our sister plants in Germany had also been having a lot of the same issues but they just hadn't shared that information with us. In fact, many of ABB's top customers were having this trouble.

We kept trying to tell them all of this was due to pressure build up in the gear box's, but ABB refused to believe any of this. We even experimented with putting vents on the first 3 axis like the previous generation ABB's had. (S4C robots).

You would have thought that their R&D department would have discovered this early on in testing.

We have actually taken the fill plugs, "not the drain plugs" out of axis 3 on several robots and have had a 10 to 15 foot stream of hot oil to come shooting out of the fill plug hole. However, ABB engineers still said, " WE DON'T HAVE A PRESSURE PROBLEM!"

They even hired an engineer just to be over the project of fixing this problem.

Their so called fix was actually cutting the shaft end plate cover out to hold 2 seals back to back.

Just in case you don't know, servo seals aren't designed to handle pressure of any kind, they are just mainly dust shield.

However, since the gearbox's were actually building pressure they were requiring the seals to keep the oil out.

Basically this cost ABB millions of dollars and who knows how many customers. I know for a fact that this reason alone cost them the contract with the US BMW plant for the last 5 body shops. In fact, you can read that many customers that had the older S4C and S4C+ robots started refurbishing their manipulators and upgrading their controllers and cables with the newer IRC5 controllers.

I actually did the research to find seals that are made for pressure to replace the factory seals in the motors, but as you are probably aware we are just considered dumb Americans to the Germans and Sweden's.

I empathize with dblbeard on many of his points. I've seen robots where the axis 2 vent hole plug is replaced with actual venting plugs. ABB was to have fixed this by changing the the oil from Tivela S150 to Kyodo Yushi TMO150 (which is S150 with additional additives to address friction). The millions they lost are being made up by what they charge for the now proprietary TMO150.

A good motor rebuild facility will be able to upgrade the seal. Seen this done with Fanuc motors which are notorious for oil/grease contamination caused brake issues.

I had mentioned that there was I problem I had heard about years ago, during the s4C+ era, so I have to take a minor issue with dblbeard calling it out to be an IRC5 problem. After all, that is the controller, not the actual manipulator.

Quote from Lemster68

S4C, S4C+, IRC5 are examples of controller version, would give me indication of age. I asked about the motors because there was a widespread problem years ago with Elmo motors having leaky seals. As best I can remember being told. Elmo had changed the seal without OK from ABB and ABB had to go out and replace many motors because of that. They later ceased using Elmo motors.

I remember ABB came in and changed wrists at no charge due to leakage into the axis 6 motor on M98/99 IRB6400 of a certain serial # range. The seal issue was coupled with their poor decision to briefly use the thinner Molywhite Re.00 recommended by Nabtesco.