A series of brushless linear servo motors designed specifically for continuous duty cycle applications in machine tools has been unveiled by CNC specialist NUM.

The new LMX series linear motors incorporate a number of features to help mitigate the effect of arduous operating conditions. The moving coil primary section is fully encapsulated in a robust stainless-steel housing, with an integrated cooling circuit designed to maximize the flow rate, which also allows use of low specific heat capacity cooling liquids. The motors have a short pole pitch to increase force density, minimizeSource: NUM cogging forces and reduce thermal losses.

LMX linear motors comprise a metal track with multiple embedded rare Earth magnets, and a coil assembly supported by a customer-supplied guideway. A key feature of the motors is that they are designed to operate with a comparatively large air gap of 1 mm to reduce the impact of mounting tolerances on performance characteristics. For most machine tool applications, the track is held stationary and the coil assembly is free to move — but converse mounting arrangements are also practicable, with similar performance attributes.

Suitable for use with standard three-phase sinusoidal brushless servo drives, NUM’s LMX series linear motors are especially cost-effective when teamed with the company’s NUMDrive X or new NUM DrivePro drives. Both these families of high-performance drives feature a high degree of functional integration, making them some of the smallest available, and offer extensive safe motion monitoring and control options to help simplify design-in.

The new NUM DrivePro drives are likely to be of particular interest to original equipment manufacturers seeking maximum performance from NUM’s new LMX series linear motors. Implemented using advanced system-on-chip (SoC) technology and based on a multi-core ARM processor, the drives employ bare metal programming to eliminate operating system latency.