From the industrial floors to the electronic home appliances and robotics, the use of the stepper motor is rampant. Any application that requires precision control will have to deploy stepping motor solution to achieve a greater degree of precision. And it requires you to have a proper understanding of the technicalities and application to apply the machines in the right place.
What is a stepper motor?
Basically, it is a DC motor that moves in distinct steps; it involves coils organized in a grouping system known as phases and as each phase gets the electrical pulse as they move one step at a time. With CNC drive the stepper motor can perform tasks precisely. And depending on the winding the motors are classified as either unipolar or bipolar stepper motor. And each has their own specific functionality.
The advantages of the stepping motor:
- Positioning: The repeatability of the stepping motor makes them one of the best choices for the applications where precision is of prime importance. The devices like the 3D printer, camera, and disk drives are the finest example of their application.
- Speed Control – These motors follow a precision increment pattern that offers exceptional control of the rotational speed which makes these motors ideal choice for automation and robotics.
- Low-Speed Torque: since these motors have a great torque at the lowest speed, they serve better in applications where precisions are required at the lowest speed.
Step Count:
The next thing that you need to understand is its step count; you can avail stepper motors ranging from 4 to 400 steps per revolution. However, 24, 48 and 200 steps per revolution are widely used in various applications. The revolution is denominated by the degree per step, which means a 1.8° stepping motor will have 200 steps per revolution.
Gearing:
By applying gearing, you can achieve greater precision; however, you have to compromise with the speed because when the speed goes up, the torque lessens. Therefore, the geared steppers are only used in the Low RPM applications.
How to Choose the Right Motor?
While choosing the stepping motor you have to look at the maximum voltage and current that the driver can supply to the motor. In case of stepping motor, the continuous current is more important the peak current. Hence, make sure that you look at the continuous current, not the other one.
You also need to understand the electrical specifications that include Amp per phase and resistance per phase. While amp per phase determines the maximum current that the machine can handle without getting overheated, the resistance per phase decides the resistance of each phase.
You must understand the need for the application because stepping motors come with various sizes; from tiny to monstrous NEMA 57, you can avail stepping motors of all sizes. But here you have to understand that all the stepping motor come with torque rating. And you have to closely look at the torque rating to verify the strength of the motor.
The common steeping motor, NEMA 17 is widely used in various applications such as robotics, animatronic applications, and 3D printer and CNC mills. The bigger NEMA frames are meant for industrial application. However, never get confused between BLDC Motor and stepping motor; in fact, both the motors are almost same but have different utility and follow distinct mechanism.
Before you decide to deploy stepper motors in your project, you have to find out your requirements. And the best way to understand your need is to analyze the nature of the project. Once you have decided the stepping motor solution ensure that you deploy other tools such as Optical Encoder to improve the performance.
It is advisable that you should consult a stepping motor solution organization that offers a comprehensive stepping motor solution. And at each step during the selection or upgrading process, you must speak with the technical support team of the supplier to make informed decisions.
Ultimately, the organization that exclusively deals with the stepping motor solution should be the ideal choice because only expertise and experts can guide you through the complex mechanism and applications of a stepping motor.
Therefore, choose the organization wisely; you can verify the authenticity of the company by visiting their website. You can also read customer reviews to find out their quality. So, do your groundwork before you deploy the stepping motor solution.
