Linear electric motors engineered for machine tools
Engineering360 News Desk | November 11, 2022A 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.