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

With recent trends focusing on improving engineering efficiency, many products have been developed to specifically help shorten design cycles for machine automation.  Part of improving efficiency is making products easier to use, so additional time and resources can be spent elsewhere.  This post describes a product feature that can make index table applications less complex to manage.

In the market of electric motors, there are products designed for general purpose applications, and there are motors designed for specialized applications, such as automated guided vehicles (AGVs) or autonomous mobile robots (AMRs).  While standard, general-purpose motors work for most applications such as factory automation, sometimes, it may help accelerate your design cycle by going with a motor system that already offers the features that you are planning to design into your machine.  In this post, we will summarize some of these features.

Stepper motors are popular for their ability to stop accurately as well as their ease of use.  Both the amount of rotation and the speed are controlled easily with the same digital square wave pulse signal.  Unlike servo motors, stepper motors do not need an encoder to operate.  Example applications of stepper motors are CNC machines, index tables, robotics, scanners, and more recently, 3D printers.

Automation is great for repetitive tasks, such as test fixtures for a process that has to repeated.  In this post, we will explain how to perform a reciprocating motion (back and forth cycles) with a product that does not require a PLC or external presence sensors, which can help speed up design cycles.

There are a variety of ways to synchronize the speed of multiple motors.  In this blog post, we will explain another advantage of using brushless motors systems, which is its ability to set speeds accurately and be able to synchronize speeds on multiple axes easily .  Brushless motors utilize built-in hall-effect sensors to regulate speed.  Even if the load, input voltage, or temperature fluctuates, the speed regulation will always be under +/-0.2% or better.

With the growing popularity of efficient brushless motors, replacing AC motors with these motors brings several advantages.  In this blog post, we will uncover one of the advantages that can benefit lighter and compact equipment designs.  If we just look at the motors, brushless motors are much more power efficient than AC induction motors.  This means a smaller brushless motor can do the work of a bigger AC motor.  With recent trends in efficiency, brushless motors should be considered during the motor selection process for new designs.

Parallel shaft AC gear motors are the standard configuration in the industry.  However, right angle brushless gear motors are gaining popularity for their ability to minimize the footprint of a machine, such as a conveyor.