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

The viscosity change in liquids can vary the torque required for mixing.  For AC asynchronous motors such as AC induction motors, the rated speed is affected by load torque fluctuations, which may cause inconsistency in the final product.  Is there a better motor for the job?

For automated factories, motor failures mean lost production and lost revenue.  Being able to identify the specific issue in advance and its location is critical to maintaining production efficiency.  To be successful, extra sensors must be added to detect abnormalities.  There may be an easier way.

Oriental Motor offers many pre-assembled geared motors for quality, consistency, and reliability.   In addition, gearheads from our industry partners increase the torque range of our motors further to accommodate more applications.  Here are some advantages of geared motors.

A gripper is typically an end effector that is installed at the end of a robotic arm or on a cartesian robot and can be used to grip parts in order to transfer them from one location to another.  However, there's more to it than just closing the jaws to pinch a part.  

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.

Most of us still use the traditional "reactive" maintenancemethod in many aspects of life, such as replacing a dishwasher in your kitchen.  People don't buy a dishwasher until theirs doesn't work anymore.  Well, for factories that rely on consistent uptime for production, this wasn't the best strategy.  Realizing the need for improvement, maintenance personnel started to estimate life and replace motion control components before they failed.  This is called the "preventive" maintenancemethod, which also wasn't a perfect strategy for cost.  More recently, with the advancement of IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) technologies and real-time availability of status data, another method was made possible - the "predictive" maintenance method.

Robot adoption is increasing in many industries due to global efforts in reducing long term costs, maintaining quality, and freeing up time for humans to do "human" tasks.  For example, by using a robot to clean floors or restock shelves in a supermarket, human employees can spend more time helping or selling to their customers.  A company can either tap into this robotic trend by buying ready-made robots, or by making their own with less cost. 

If engineering resources are limited, selecting the right components can reduce the difficulty and time for building a robot.

There are many mechanisms that convert rotary motion of an electric motor to linear motion, such as belt/chain drives, screw drives, rack & pinion drives and even CAM drives.  Each mechanism offers advantages and disadvantages. Choosing the right technology can help increase load, speed, travel distance, or positioning accuracy.

An AC motor can be simple to use, but its speed changes according to the size of the load or amount of voltage supplied.  For an application where keeping a uniform speed is important, there is another type of motor that can improve performance.

Are you using motors for a start/stop conveyor or similar application?  While AC motors are a common choice for conveyors, there is a unique speed control motor solution available that could improve stop accuracy as well as reduce footprint and cost of machine designs.

What motors do you use for pumps?  For variable speed pump applications that typically use 3-phase AC induction motors with variable frequency drives (VFDs), there is another type of motor that can transfer fluids more consistently and help reduce footprint.