Welcome to Oriental Motor's "Engineering Notes" Blog:

An AC motor is not working like it's supposed to.  What do you do?  Before replacing the motor, here are three ways to start troubleshooting your AC motor with a circuit tester.

For a permanent-split capacitor type AC motor (also known as capacitor start and run AC motors), a capacitor is required for proper operation.  Enjoy a cup of coffee as we explain why.

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I thought I'd change gears (pun intended) and write about what Oriental Motor is thankful for.  

First, we are thankful for our customers for being our customers and helping us grow to be a globally reputable motion control manufacturer. 

Second, we are thankful for the awards and recognition we've received over the years.  It's always good to know that we're doing a good job and these accolades definitely serve as motivation to become even better at what we do.

While we are grateful for these awards and recognition, our greatest satisfaction comes from applying our award-winning products to solve motion control challenges for our customers.

AC motors have the same operating theory, but by changing its design a little, you can modify its characteristics to suit certain applications better.  In the last post, I focused on AC induction motors for unidirectional applications.  In this post, I will explain what makes AC reversible motors and AC electromagnetic brake motors ideal for start/stop, reversing, or vertical applications, and demonstrate how to operate them.

AC motors are simple to control, rugged, and cost effective for general purpose applications.  These reasons are why they are the most popular type of electric motor across various industries.  In this post, we will briefly introduce induction motors and demonstrate how to operate these motors.

Do you know how to use this graph?

Stepper motors vibrate.  It's what they do.  To minimize motor vibration, first we need to understand where they come from.

The terms "absolute" and "incremental" come up frequently in the world of position control.  The exact meaning can be the type of motion done by the motor in programming terms or the type of feedback device used with the motor.  In this article, we will focus on the differences between an incremental closed-loop feedback system and an absolute closed-loop feedback system.

The word, "AlphaStep", describes Oriental Motor's patented Hybrid Control technology, which offers improved stepper motor performance by sensing the rotor position and automatically switching between open-loop and closed-loop operation when necessary.  This post explains the unique technologies offered within the AlphaStep family of products and summarizes the numerous integrated options available.  It also can serve as a website navigation guide (video added).

Along with the advancement of industrial technology, maintenance methods of motion control components of a machine, such as motors, drives, and sensors, have also evolved.  Which method is the most efficient?

The most common method of maintaining a machine after a failure has occurred was the traditionalreactive maintenancemethod.  Realizing the need for improvement, maintenance personnel started to estimate life and replace motion control components before they fail.  This is called the preventive maintenancemethod.  More recently, with the advancement of IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) and real-time availability of status data, another method was born - the predictive maintenance method.

The three maintenance methods have the same goal of eliminating machine downtime but do it differently.