Energy efficient and virtually silent – Nanotec's new SMCI36 motor controller, with dspDrive, ClosedLoop and CANopen

Energy efficient and virtually silent – Nanotec's new SMCI36 motor controller, with dspDrive, ClosedLoop and CANopen

Landsham (Germany), December 21, 2010 – At year's end, Nanotec Electronic GmbH & Co. KG presents its new SMCI36 motor controller. In the further development of the external motor controller with positioning control, Nanotec focused on the needs of engineers who are looking for quick, small and energy-efficient solutions for distributed applications.

Demand is increasing for technologies such as ClosedLoop and CANopen. ClosedLoop provides energy-efficient motor controlling and, with the field-oriented control, expensive geared servomotor systems can be replaced with more favorably-priced stepper motors. This is particularly true for rotational speeds up to 1500 rpm or torques up to 10 Nm. CANopen because the bus standard makes rapid communication with the individual components of a drive solution possible.

The new SMCI36 controller is distinguished by its compact construction and comes with a ClosedLoop-capable encoder input. Nanotec only utilizes "real" ClosedLoop. This means that the stator magnetic field is controlled via the rotary encoder, like a servomotor. The stepper motor can no longer lose any more steps, all the way up to its maximum torque. The level of current is continually adjusted to the torque currently required. This substantially decreases current consumption and heat development in comparison with conventional stepper motor controllers. This leads not only to reduced electrical power requirements, but also to a longer service life for components.

Together with dspDrive® technology, the SMCI 36 model provides especially quiet-running, low-vibration stepper motors as required for medical technology, laboratory automation, optical devices etc. But also in the normal clock direction mode, stepper motors operated with this software-based current controller (dspDrive) are significantly quieter than established solutions with integrated ICs, as the entire control circuit is carried out with 12-bit resolution. Thanks to the software-based control circuit, both stepper and BLDC motors can be controlled with the same hardware.

Whether the external stepper motor driver is operated via the CANopen or the RS485 interface can be configured by means of jumpers. In the SMCI36 model as well, parameterization is carried out with minimal development effort by means of the user-friendly NanoPro Windows program which offers a variety of functions that have grown over the years.

The CANopen version of the SMCI36 makes the most of its advantages in distributed automation solutions. Motors activated with the compact SMCI36 can easily be integrated in CANopen bus systems and configured via the CAN bus. For example, there is already a complete driver for the CoDeSys V3 SoftMotion SoftSPS program available from 3S Smart Software Solutions GmbH for integrating the controllers in multiple axle applications by means of the CANopen Interpolated mode.

Technical data: Operating voltage: max. 80 V, 6 A phase current