The VW3AE2501 is a line choke from the Altivar 61 Plus and Altivar 71 Plus drive range, designed as a protection accessory for floor-standing enclosures with separate air flows or compact versions. It sits between the mains supply and the drive's rectifier stage, smoothing current harmonics and limiting inrush peaks — the kind of front-end conditioning that keeps a drive's DC bus capacitors from seeing repeated surge stress on a heavily loaded line.
This part is marked obsolete by Schneider Electric. That means no further factory production runs are planned.
The VW3AE2501 is a line choke, not a load reactor or output filter. Its job is on the AC input side: it attenuates harmonic distortion and limits the rate of rise of fault current, which helps the drive meet EMC emission limits and reduces stress on upstream contactors and fuses. Being a protection accessory, it does not carry a current rating in the same sense as a motor — the sizing is driven by the drive's input current draw. If you are retrofitting into an existing Altivar 61 Plus or 71 Plus floor-standing enclosure, the mechanical fit is specific to that enclosure family; it is not a generic DIN-rail mount.