[Shishuo Core Products] N samples of motor drive digital manufacturing

Shop floor equipment lines – Assembly systems are becoming increasingly complex, adding intelligence to highly flexible modular assembly machines. To take these machines to the next level, every component needs to be optimized for real-time communication and monitoring. After all, the failure of just one component in the entire assembly can cause a complete shutdown.

Digital Machining – Digital technology has had a huge impact on prototyping and manufacturing. Just like 3D printing, applications such as CNC milling and laser cutting are widely used, speeding up development cycles across all industries. Real products can now be manufactured directly from the design software, relying on precise and reliable motion control with integrated safety features, resulting in safer, more reliable and most efficient equipment.

Automated Pick and Place Machines – While pick and place machines may seem to perform only basic movements, some machines require the utmost flexibility to complete demanding tasks such as placing individual components on a PCB or picking up objects from a conveyor belt and correspondingly place them. Regardless of the task, all pick and place machines require efficient, reliable and flexible drives.

Testing and measuring equipment - In modern industrial manufacturing technology and scientific research, measuring instruments have a trend of precision, integration and intelligence. When it comes to test and measurement equipment, accuracy and repeatability are key to obtaining reliable results. For example, three-dimensional coordinate measurement is critical for high-accuracy measurement of the size, shape and mutual position of all three-dimensional complex parts in production.

Conveying system - the conveying of materials plays a very important role in factory operations. It is an important link in industrial production. A good material flow method not only saves time, labor and costs, but also maintains the operation of the production line, and will greatly Improve our production efficiency.

In almost all of these industrial application scenarios, we can find that motors play an important role in them. With the digital development of industrial manufacturing, the market's requirements for stepper motors are becoming more stringent. They not only require low noise, smooth operation, high energy efficiency, high speed and high torque, but also require increased real-time monitoring of abnormal behavior of equipment and processes. optimization .

Especially for stepper motors that are closely related to system functions, if advanced diagnostics are integrated at the chip level to realize motion and force control and monitoring, some of the automatic diagnostic functions of Industry 4.0 can be realized in advance, improving accuracy, reliability and efficiency, regardless of Whether it's digital machining, a shop floor assembly line, or automated pick and place machines or production line test and measurement equipment, it will achieve greater accuracy and efficiency and significantly reduce downtime.

How to achieve motion and force control in stepper motor applications? The traditional thinking may immediately think of: first, add a torque sensor; second, detect the motor current. However, adding force sensors will increase the system cost. For a stepper motor in an open-loop system, constant current chopper control is mostly used, and its current is constant. Detecting motor current can only increase the number of encoders, and this method will also increase the cost of the control system.

Electric motors such as steppers and BLDC use magnetic fields to rotate, and from the rotor's perspective, the stator's electromagnetic field pulls or pushes the rotor. This results in a phase shift between the rotor magnetic field and the direction of the stator's rotating field, which is the load angle, or the angle between the two magnetic field directions of the motor's rotor and stator. Under normal load conditions, the load angle is low, and part of the energy flowing into the motor also flows back to the power source, creating a back electromotive force. This back EMF represents the mechanical load on the motor, which means it can be used to monitor the actual load conditions of the drive system without the use of other components.

Using the back electromotive force principle of the motor, ADI Trinamic motor driver StallGuard™ and CoolStep™ add motor load detection capabilities to motor applications for sensorless homing and stall protection. StallGuard is a sensorless load measurement for stepper motors that provides cost-effective feedback on load angle. The sensitivity can be adjusted according to application needs, making it a sensorless homing, self-calibration, distance measurement or to verify that all mechanical devices are still intact. Ideal for operation within safety margins, eliminating the need for references or limit switches and reducing cost and complexity in applications requiring precise referencing. Typically, open-loop stepper drives lose steps due to stalling during overload conditions, such as when the axis is blocked. StallGuard technology prevents step loss, maintaining step integrity by stopping the motor when a set load value is reached. Sensorless technology can detect up to 1024 different load levels, providing high-resolution feedback for continuous monitoring of the system.

CoolStep provides dynamic current control based on StallGuard values, sensorless load-dependent current control originally developed for medical equipment and laboratory automation, always driving the motor with the minimum amount required for actual load conditions. Based on CoolStep and StallGuard technology, it can reduce motor energy consumption by up to 90% and effectively reduce heat generation. Also, by eliminating current safety margins and allowing temporary current boosts, CoolStep allows for smaller motors because less torque reserve is required.

Powered by StallGuard and CoolStep, the entire motor control system can be optimized by real-time monitoring of abnormal behavior. Whether it is mechanical wear or loads not within specified margins, ADI Trinamic's embedded solutions can detect and flag events, integrating the motor and the entire Systems become "sensors" that increase efficiency by adding valuable information to data sets to control production lines in real time.

TMC5160 is a high-power stepper motor control driver chip with step/direction interface and serial communication interface (SPI). It combines a flexible ramp generator for automatic target positioning with the industry's advanced stepper motor driver. Highly dynamic, high-torque motor drives (up to 20A coil current) are enabled by external external transistors, making system miniaturization and performance scalability feasible, enabling cost-effective and efficient solutions. On the basis of achieving high performance, the complete solution can shorten the learning time as much as possible and speed up the time to market.

The TMC4671 is another fully integrated servo controller suitable for industrial motor drives, providing field-oriented control (FOC) for BLDC/PMSM and 2-phase stepper motors, as well as DC motors and voice coils. All control functions are implemented in hardware. Integrated ADC, position sensor interface, and position interpolator make the fully functional servo controller suitable for various servo applications. Alternatively, customers can adopt the three-axis motor controller/driver board TMCM-3351 for two-phase bipolar stepper motors or the six-axis stepper motor controller/driver module TMCM-6110 for sensorless load-dependent current control. .

The principles of ease of use and cost-effectiveness are the guiding principles for ADI Trinamic designers when designing stepper motor drive chips. These solutions integrate powerful stepper motor drivers and motion controllers on one chip to directly convert digital information into smooth, precise, and reliable physical movements. They are widely used in robots, industrial drives, textiles, sewing machines, packaging, Factory and laboratory automation, high-speed 3D printers, liquid handling, medical, office automation, video surveillance, ATMs and other applications.