Mitsubishi FREQROL FR-SE Replacement Recommendations?

We are retrofitting a Mazak VQC with a Mazatrol M2 / Mitsubishi Meldas YM2 control on it.
Part of that control is a AC spindle motor with a Freqrol FR-SE controller.

The original plan was to just tap into the Freqrol using the existing Meldas wiring; however, a power supply in the Freqrol is bad. The cost is going to be about $600+ to repair/replace the power supply. At that cost, I am looking at just paying a little more to forestall potential future problems with the entire spindle drive/controller.

That said, does anybody have recommendations for a good, industrial quality / reliable but economical spindle drive for a 7.5HP Mitsubishi AC motor? VFD? Drive?

I understand how to wire these things up using the existing control connections, but am not as familiar as I'd like with new options for controlling existing motors. ALSO, we will want to be able to orient the spindle for an ATC (as it currently is/was able to do), and will want to progress into rigid tapping & actual speed feedback (I know the current controller was capable of that, I haven't looked yet to see if the encoder option was actually installed on this particular machine).

THANK YOU!

I have a 7.5HP Mitsubishi spindle motor - 5.5kW / 32A max. A 1024 ppr shaft encoder is mounted on the spindle.
The current spindle controller is 5.5kW, and handles orienting for toolchange, and closes the speed loop.

I am looking at replacing with a Hitachi VFD - either a WJ200 or a SJ700 series - both are 'sensorless vector drives'.
I've got a few questions:
1) Is there a problem with swapping a 'spindle controller' for a VFD? It seems basically the same thing, but I'm not sure if I'm missing little details
2) The output of the 7.5HP VFD I'm looking at is 230V/25A. The motor is 200V/32A... Based on some discussion on Practical Machinist, it appears I would need to upgrade to a 10HP VFD 230V/35A to get full motor capacity?
3) Any idea on line chokes / line reactors - how do I know whether I should put them on the VFD input? output? It should be mounted in the cabinet on the machine, if that makes a difference.
4) I have the option of buying an encoder feedback card for the VFD ... is there any benefit (besides config ease) to allowing the drive to handle the velocity loop and spindle orient instead of saving money & using a Mesa 7i48 to read the encoder input and close the velocity loop in LinuxCNC and use a mux to handle spindle orient in LinuxCNC?
5) Any gotchas or anything else I'm not thinking of?

Thanks!

You can almost certainly do all that you need with a conventional VFD.

On the particular point of rigid-tapping: LinuxCNC slaves the Z axis to the spindle, so as long as LinuxCNC can reverse the spindle, it will work. All that LinuxCNC needs is spindle position feedback, not accurate spindle angle control.

Having said that, spindle orient, while not exactly difficult with an ordinary VFD might be easier with dedicated hardware.

Thanks, Andy!

We had asked specifically about this spindle drive / vfd and got a lot of feedback from practical machinist that had us doubting ourselves (mostly from not understanding the possibilities in the LinuxCNC control, or us not doing a good job explaining the motor specs), but after talking to the engineer over at our cnc service company and a lot of research, we just bit the bullet today on a Hitachi SJ700D with an encoder card. The encoder card is supposed to enable the drive to handle orientation, much like the current controller does.

It helps to have it confirmed that LinuxCNC won't have any problems. It is certainly confirming of our choice to standardize around LinuxCNC when it opens up so many options in hardware!

Now, we just are going to need to figure out how to also feed the encoder back into LinuxCNC as well - we had been looking at a Mesa 7i47S, but I'm not sure if it's going to need an emulator (?) or something to allow both the VFD encoder card and LinuxCNC to see the encoder at the same time?

SRDC wrote: Now, we just are going to need to figure out how to also feed the encoder back into LinuxCNC as well - we had been looking at a Mesa 7i47S, but I'm not sure if it's going to need an emulator (?) or something to allow both the VFD encoder card and LinuxCNC to see the encoder at the same time?

You can probably just pass the same encoder signal to both devices. It is also possible that the drive encoder card will have pass-through connections.

For what it is worth.... I have used both wj200 and the older sj700 with success. Couple of things to consider . Is the motor an induction or permanent mangnet motor, pm motors do not run well with standard vfds. Both hitachi drives will drive a pm motor, but last I checked, you won't be able to use the encoder with the drive for speed sensing, if it's a pm motor.
The wj200 works well and is easy to set up, it only uses a single +0-10 v signal, it does not like large regenerative currents or voltages and will blow the internal braking transistor easily, personal experience here.... It is not a repairable item, it blows, its junk. So, you will need an external braking unit and resisitors, automation direct has some decent stuff cheap.
The sj300 is sturdier, it's also more expensive. If the power supply in the Mitsubishi drive is repairable, have a go at it. If it is like the one i had, the ps is in the upper rh corner of the drive, there is a ziener diode up there that loves to blow, try replacing it and the electrolytic caps. Consider
Checking the rectifier also, as it could be blown. If Mitsubishi wil fix it for $600, it can't be a difficult repair. Have a go at it, how much worse can you make it?