Samotics x ABB
Turn your ABB drive into a condition monitoring sensor
ABB and Samotics put Electrical Signature Analysis (ESA) inside ABB drives. The drive reads its own current and voltage, and spots developing faults in the motor, transmission and the equipment it powers. When something's wrong, ABB's experts tell you what to do.
Powertrains fail silently. Your sensors can't always reach them.
Industry runs on millions of motor-driven assets. Yet 30–40% of critical powertrains go unmonitored between inspection rounds — not because teams don't care, but because instrumenting them has never been practical.
Submerged and hazardous assets
Submerged pumps, borehole motors and equipment in hot or toxic areas can't carry field sensors. Until now, these assets were simply regarded as unmonitorable — inspected only when lifted, or when they failed.
Instrumentation that doesn't scale
Vibration sensors mean cabling, access permits, scaffolding and installation downtime — multiplied across every asset in the fleet. Rollouts stall on effort and cost long before they reach the assets that need monitoring most.
Blind dispatch, reactive repair
Without condition data, every alarm is a blind dispatch and every failure is an emergency. Teams stretched across large sites and remote stations fall back on reactive maintenance — and pay for it in downtime.
Drives that only watch themselves
Modern drives monitor their own health and recommend their own maintenance. But the motor, gearbox and pump behind them — where most failures actually develop — stay dark.
Because ESA is embedded in the drive, it can monitor assets where other technologies struggle, such as submerged pumps or equipment in hot and toxic areas.
From electrical signal to maintenance action, in six steps
Half of the pipeline runs on the edge, half in the cloud. You only see the part that matters: a clear, verified notification — before failure.
Data acquisition
The drive measures high-quality three-phase current and voltage — enabled by ABB's UCU control platform.
Signal processing
Signals are transformed from the time domain to the frequency domain, where fault signatures become visible.
Scorer calculation
Failure indicators are calculated at the fault frequencies relevant to your specific motor and application.
Failure detection
Machine-learning models track trends across combinations of indicators to catch developing failures early.
Failure diagnosis
Anomalies are diagnosed against Samotics' library of failure fingerprints, including root-cause analysis.
Incident notification
You receive an expert-verified alert with a recommended action — by email and on the 24/7 dashboard.
Watch how the drive becomes the sensor
One signal runs through everything.
The current and voltage the drive measures carry the health of every link in the powertrain — so a fault anywhere leaves a trace the drive can read.
Power supply
Harmonic distortion, voltage unbalance
The drive
DC-link wear, IGBT thermal cycling, drive-fan failure
Motor
Rotor bars, bearings, stator faults, misalignment, unbalance
Transmission
Coupling eccentricity, gearbox teeth, belt & pulley unbalance
Driven load
Pump cavitation, impeller damage, blockage, dry running
Complementary by design
ESA sets a strong baseline for pumps, fans, mixers and conveyors. For complex, high-speed assets it works hand in hand with ABB's established vibration analysis. Detection capability varies by application type.
See all the assets we monitor →Built together since 2022
This isn't an integration bolted on last quarter. ABB took a 10% stake in Samotics in 2022, and the two teams spent three years engineering ESA into the drive platform itself.
Strategic partnership
ABB and Samotics enter a long-term partnership; ABB acquires a 10% stake. SAM4 joins ABB's digital service portfolio.
Co-development
Joint engineering to extract high-quality electrical data directly from the drive — enabled by ABB's new UCU control unit — followed by testing and piloting.
ACS880 integration announced
SAM4 ESA capabilities integrated into ABB's ACS880 drives; early-adopter program opens in selected countries.
Global launch at ADIPEC
ABB launches embedded ESA for modernized ACS600 and ACS800 drives — part of the ABB Ability™ Condition Monitoring suite.
"By embedding ESA directly into the modernized drives, we unlock predictive insights across the entire powertrain. This transforms drives into intelligent sensors."
The story, as it broke
FAQ
No. It uses the exact same analytics engine, drawing on high-quality electrical data measured by the drive itself. The setup is much easier to deploy — the insights are just as powerful.
New ACS880 drives (with the UCU control unit), and modernized ACS600 and ACS800 cabinet-built drives through ABB's modernization service. Additional drive families are on the roadmap. For other setups, standalone SAM4 covers direct-online motors and non-ABB drives.
Any three-phase AC motor and its driven equipment — pumps (including submerged and borehole), fans, mixers, conveyors, screw compressors and more, plus the transmission in between. Detection capability varies by application; DC, servo and 2-pole synchronous motors are not supported.
Data flows from the drive to an ABB EGW-02 edge gateway (one gateway serves up to 10 drives), then securely to the cloud for analysis. The gateway is developed and managed by ABB, modernized drives carry ABB's TÜV-certified cybersecurity, and Samotics is ISO 27001 and ISO 9001 certified. The system is monitoring-only — it cannot send commands to any asset.
No — it's complementary. For pumps, fans, conveyors and mixers, ESA alone sets a strong baseline. On complex or high-speed assets, ESA and ABB's vibration analysis together provide the most complete view of powertrain health.
An expert-verified notification describing the developing failure, its root cause, and a recommended maintenance action — plus incident-based and quarterly reports and 24/7 dashboard access. Should an issue be detected, ABB's global expert network supports you with targeted service actions.
Almost nothing about the modernization itself — that's the point. Embedded ESA is added as part of ABB's standard modernization service for ACS600 and ACS800 drives, turning a hardware refresh into a monitoring upgrade for the entire powertrain in the same intervention.
Where embedded ESA fits, and where it needs review
The solution is strongest where the asset is driven by a compatible ABB drive, the motor is three-phase AC, and the failure modes create measurable changes in current, voltage or load — pumps, fans, mixers and conveyors are the sweet spot.
Fit depends on drive type, motor configuration, application and the failure modes you want to catch. During asset-fit review, we identify which assets are strong candidates, which need engineering review, and which are better covered by vibration analysis, standalone SAM4, or inspection.
Start with the drives you're modernizing anyway.
Review your drive fleet with our engineers — which drives qualify today, what ESA will see on your applications, and what a rollout looks like before scaling.