A Stepper motor is an electromechanical device it converts electrical power into mechanical power. Let’s see the various Advantages of Stepper Motor along with its applications.
How do Stepper Motor work?
The stepper motor uses the theory of operation for magnets to make the motor shaft turn a precise movement when a pulse of electricity is provided. The speed of the motor is controlled by the frequency of the pulses. A stepper motor is a “digital” version of the electric motor. The rotor moves in discrete steps as commanded, rather than rotating continuously like a conventional motor.
Types of Stepper Motor:
There are three main types of stepper motors, they are:
- Permanent Magnet Stepper Motor
- Variable Reluctance Stepper Motor
- Hybrid Synchronous Stepper Motor
Various Advantages of Stepper Motor:
- The rotation angle of the motor is proportional to the input pulse.
- The motor has full torque at standstill (if the windings are energized)
- Precise positioning and repeatability of movement since good stepper motors have an accuracy of 3 – 5% of a step and this error is non cumulative from one step to the next.
- Excellent response to starting/stopping/reversing.
- Very reliable since there are no contact brushes in the motor. Therefore the life of the motor is simply dependant on the life of the bearing.
- The motors response to digital input pulses provides open-loop control, making the motor simpler and less costly to control.
- It is possible to achieve very low speed synchronous rotation with a load that is directly coupled to the shaft.
- A wide range of rotational speeds can be realized as the speed is proportional to the frequency of the input pulses
Applications of stepper motor:
Due to the various Advantages of Stepper Motor it finds many applications. Few are listed below.
- CD disk drive
- Hard disk drive
- Driving paper feed mechanism in Printers
- Driving Pens in Plotters
- Robotics
- Numerical Control Machine Tools
- Tape drives and Video recorders.
- Industrial Machines – Stepper motors are used in automotive gauges and also machine tooling automated production equipment’s.
- Security – new surveillance products for the security industry.
- Medical – Stepper motors are used inside medical scanners, samplers, and also found inside digital dental photography, fluid pumps, respirators and also blood analysis machinery.
- Consumer Electronics – Stepper motors in cameras for automatic digital camera focus and also zoom functions.
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