What are the advantages of stepper motors being widely used?

Advantages Of Stepper Motors Being Widely Used

Stepper motors are now well known and widely used by most people, which is of course due to their own advantages and performance.  In particular, the step value of the motor is not affected by various disturbing factors.  Such as the size of the voltage, the value of the current, the waveform, the change of temperature and so on.

There is also the fact that the error of the stepper motor at work will not be accumulated for a long time.  Generally there is always a certain error between the angle turned by the motor for each step and the theoretical step, and there is always a certain accumulated error from a certain step to any step, but the accumulated error for each revolution is zero, so the accumulated error of the step is not accumulated for a long time.

One of the advantages of stepper motor is good control performance, start, stop, flip are completed in a few pulses, in a certain frequency range when running in any mode of motion will not lose a step.  Therefore, stepper motors are widely used in CNC machine tools.  Motors are also most widely used on CNC machine tools.  In addition, the motor has these advantages: low and medium output torque, open loop control, cost-effective only about a quarter of the servo, so cost-effective motors are also chosen by most people.  But in addition to most of the advantages of all the motor, it also has some minor disadvantages: such as vibration, heat, high speed performance is poor, there is the possibility of losing steps, and there is also the work of the time will need a specialized drive.

Advantages and disadvantages of stepper motors

Now that we understand how stepper motors work, it will be helpful to summarize the advantages and disadvantages of each type of motor.

Stepper motor advantages:

Thanks to their internal structure, stepper motors do not require sensors to detect the motor position. Stepper motors move by executing “steps”, so the motor position at a given time can be obtained by simply counting the number of steps. In addition, stepper motors are very simple to control. It also requires a driver, but no complex calculations or adjustments are needed for it to work properly. The amount of control effort is usually small compared to other motors. Moreover, positional accuracy of up to 0.007° can be achieved if microstepping mode is used. Stepper motors provide good torque at low speeds, also hold position well and have a long service life.

Stepper motors Disadvantages:

They may go out of step when the load torque is too high. Control can be negatively affected because the actual position of the motor is not known. This problem is more likely to occur when microstepping mode is used. Stepper motors always draw maximum current even at standstill, which reduces efficiency and can lead to overheating. Stepper motors have low torque and can be very noisy at high speeds. Stepper motors have low power density and low torque-to-inertia ratio.

Stepper motors are the best choice when you need a cost-effective, easy-to-control solution with low efficiency and torque requirements at high speeds.