Motor

There are easier-to-use alternatives to the thyristor (aka SCR) based mains fed motor controllers used to control  ‘180Vdc’ brushed electric motors. These are mosfet choppers, but they tend to cost over £100 and are often poorly documented as they are made as drop-in replacements for treadmill motor controllers such as the MC2100ELS. Interfacing to them can also be tricky as ...

For brushed dc motors, Rohm has developed a pair of driver ICs. BD60210FV is for two 8 – 18V 1A motors (4A peak) and comes in a 5 x 6.4mm 16pad SSOP. It has a number of modes, including stand-by/forward/reverse over two wires, or stand-by/forward/reverse/brake over four wires, and as four half-bridges – to control a single two-phase stepper motor, ...

Verge Motorcycles has upgraded the battery in its TS Pro electric motorcycle to 20.2kWh to provide up to 217 miles of range, the company claims. On top of this, the weight of the hub-less motor in the centre-less back wheel has been halved, but Donut Motor 2.0 continues to provide the same power and same 1kNm torque as its predecessor. Total ...

Field oriented control is a mystery here – Park and Clarke transforms, plus other complicated stuff. Working though an example might clear things up a bit, but where to get a simple one. Enter the YouTube channel ‘I got distracted’, whose owner has published a lovely video that works through a practical FOC example based on some easily-obtainable hardware and ...

Texas Instruments has optimised a pair of DSPs for field-oriented motor control in domestic appliances such as washing machines, vacuum cleaners and lawn mowers. “Their capabilities, including high-speed sensor-less field-oriented control, high-torque zero-speed start-up and vibration compensation, deliver responsive motor control for everyday applications,” claimed the company. The parts are F28E120SC and F28E120SB, differing only in flash memory size: either ...

ABB motor is claiming record energy efficiency for a multi-MW motor. “The motor, destined for a steel plant in India, has achieved an efficiency rating of 99.13% during testing, a substantial improvement over ABB’s previous world record of 99.05% set in 2017,” according to the company. “Getting closer to 100% efficiency becomes increasingly challenging in terms of the motor design ...

Wisconsin company C-Motive is betting on electrostatic drive rather than magnetism for its proposed industrial motors. “The rotors and stators are made from standard PCBs and have an optimised set of conductive metal traces that radiate out from the centre hub on the plates,” according to the company, which claims its technology is scalable to multi-megawatt outputs. The PCBs are ...

Unveiled for Bonneville Speed Week, this 100mph+ 24kW dual motor e-scooter is aiming to be the world’s fastest. It comes from UK company Bo. “Inspired by the team’s experience with Williams Formula One, Bo has developed an ultra-high performance electric scooter with a higher power-to-weight ratio than a Bugatti Veyron, its mission: world’s fastest scooter,” said the company, whose CTO ...

EPC has taken its GaN driver for motorised humanoid robot joints a stage further, squeezing a control MCU and magnetic angular sensing alongside the power stage, all on a 32mm diameter PCB. Once again, the company is using three of its 100V 15Arms EPC23104 monolithic half-bridge ICs, which include power transistors, drivers and level-shifting. Power dissipation is minimised by the ...

Nidec has opened its 108,000m2 motor factory in Jiaozhou, intended to make 18 million units and 20 million inverters per year. Part of the company’s ACIM (appliance, commercial and industrial motors) division, the Nidec Qingdao Industrial Park has 75 production lines, a 8,500m2 R&D cente with eight laboratories, and an automated warehouse. “The site is a result of the integration of ...