Case studies based on NI Hardware

To drive stepper motor with different driving mode To control the speed of DC Motor Temperature control based application

Stepper Motor

Overview
A stepper, or stepping motor converts electronic pulses into proportionate mechanical movement. Each revolution of the stepper motor's shaft is made up of a series of discrete individual steps. A step is defined as the angular rotation produced by the output shaft each time the motor receives a step pulse.

Types of stepper motor

Permanent Magnet Stepper Motor Variable Reluctance Stepper Motor Hybrid Stepper Motor

Permanent Magnet Stepper Motor

The first and most basic type of stepper motors is the Permanent Magnet (PM). The rotor of the PM motor carries a permanent magnet with 2 or more poles, in a shape of disk. The stator coils will attract or repulse the permanent magnet on the rotor and will generate the torque. Here is a sketch of a PM motor:

Variable Reluctance Stepper Motor

The VR motor does not have a permanent magnet on the rotor. Instead, the rotor is made of soft iron, and performs a teethed disk like a gear. The stator has more than 4 coils. The coils are energized in opposite pairs, and will attract the rotor. It has a great advantage. These motors have no detent torque.

Hybrid Stepper Motor

The hybrid stepper motors are named so, because they combine the characteristics from both VR and PM stepper motors. They have excellent hold and dynamic torque, and very small step angles, from 0.9o to 5o, giving them A+ in accuracy. Their mechanical parts can rotate at high speeds relatively to the other stepper motor types. This is the type of motor used for high end CNC and robots. The major disadvantage is the cost.

A permanent magnet with 50 North and 50 South poles whichs is not possible to be manufactured...Therefore two disks are placed on top and bottom of a cylindrical permanent magnet

Driving Mode

Single-Coil Excitation
There are 4 coils with 90o angle between each other fixed on the stator. The way that the coils are interconnected, will finally characterize the type of stepper motor connection. This motor has 90o rotation step. The coils are activated in a cyclic order, one by one. The rotation direction of the shaft is determined by the order that the coils are activated.
This method is rarely used, generally when power saving is necessary. It provides less than half of the nominal torque of the motor, therefore the motor load cannot be high.

Full Step Driving Mode

The second and most often used method, is the Full step drive. According to this method, the coils are energized in pairs. According to the connection of the coils (series or parallel) the motor will require double the voltage or double the current to operate that needs when driving with Single-Coil Excitation. Yet, it produces 100% the nominal torque of the motor.

Half Step Driving Mode

This is a very interesting way to achieve double the accuracy of a positioning system, without changing anything from the hardware! According to this method, all coil pairs can be energized simultaneously, causing the rotor to rotate half the way as a normal step. This method can be single-coil or twocoil excitation as well.

Single-Coil excitation

Two-Coil excitation

Microstep Driving Mode

Microstepping is the most common method to control stepper motors nowadays. The idea of microstepping, is to power the coils of the motor NOT with pulses, but with a waveform similar to a sin waveform. This way, the positioning from one step to the other is smoother, making the stepper motor suitable to be used for high accuracy application

Powering with sine wave Powering with digital signal

Powering with high resolution digital signal

DC Motor

Overview
The DC Motor or Direct Current Motor is the most commonly used actuator for producing continuous movement and whose speed of rotation can easily be controlled, making them ideal for use in applications where speed control, servo type control, and/or positioning is required. A DC motor consists of two parts, a "Stator" which is the stationary part and a "Rotor" which is the rotating part.

Types of DC Motor
Brushed Motor Brushless Motor Servo Motor

Brushed Motor
This type of motor produces a magnetic field in a wound rotor (the part that rotates) by passing an electrical current through a commutator and carbon brush assembly, hence the term "Brushed". The stators (the stationary part) magnetic field is produced by using either a wound stator field winding or by permanent magnets. Generally brushed DC motors are cheap, small and easily controlled

Brushless Motor
This type of motor produce a magnetic field in the rotor by using permanent magnets attached to it and commutation is achieved electronically. They are generally smaller but more expensive than conventional brushed type DC motors because they use "Hall effect" switches in the stator to produce the required stator field rotational sequence but they have better torque/speed characteristics, are more efficient and have a longer operating life than equivalent brushed types.

Servo Motor
This type of motor is basically a brushed DC motor with some form of positional feedback control connected to the rotor shaft. They are connected to and controlled by a PWM type controller and are mainly used in positional control systems and radio controlled models.

DC Motor Switching and Control Small DC motors can be switched "On" or "Off" by means of switches, relays, transistors or mosfet circuits with the simplest form of motor control being "Linear" control. This type of circuit uses a bipolar Transistor as a Switch (A Darlington transistor may also be used were a higher current rating is required) to control the motor from a single power supply. By varying the amount of base current flowing into the transistor the speed of the motor can be controlled for example, if the transistor is turned on "half way", then only half of the supply voltage goes to the motor. If the transistor is turned "fully ON" (saturated), then all of the supply voltage goes to the motor and it rotates faster. Then for this linear type of control, power is delivered constantly to the motor as shown below. Unipolar Transistor Switch The simple switching circuit shows the connections for a Uni-directional (one direction only) motor control circuit. A continuous logic "1" or logic "0" is applied to the input of the circuit to turn the motor "ON" (saturation) or "OFF" (cut-off) respectively, with the flywheel diode connected across the motor terminals to protect the switching transistor or MOSFET from any back emf generated by the motor when the transistor turns the supply "OFF". As well as the basic "ON/OFF" control the same circuit can also be used to control the motors rotational speed. By repeatedly switching the motor current "ON" and "OFF" at a high enough frequency, the speed of the motor can be varied between stand still (0 rpm) and full speed (100%). This is achieved by varying the proportion of "ON" time (tON) to the "OFF" time (tOFF) and this can be achieved using a process known as Pulse Width Modulation.

 Pulse Width Speed Control The rotational speed of a DC motor is directly proportional to the mean (average) value of its supply voltage and the higher this value, up to maximum allowed motor volts, the faster the motor will rotate. In other words more voltage more speed. By varying the ratio between the "ON" (tON) time and the "OFF" (tOFF) time durations, called the "Duty Ratio", "Mark/Space Ratio" or "Duty Cycle", the average value of the motor voltage and hence its rotational speed can be varied.

 For simple unipolar drives the duty ratio is given as:

Mean DC output voltage fed to the motor is given as: Vmean = x Vsupply. Then by varying the width of pulse a, the motor voltage and hence the power applied to the motor can be controlled and this type of control is called Pulse Width Modulation or PWM.