New, Quieter Stepper Drives Boost Performance

The affordability and reliability of step motors "steppers" has made this technology highly popular among many industries today, ranging from electronic printers and disk drives to aircraft controls and many CNC applications. One of the major reasons for this is the application of microstepping drives, which have improved the smoothness and accuracy of the step motors. Yet, for many users, such as manufacturers using CNC equipment, the microstepping technology still has some conspicuous drawbacks. Despite micro-stepping technology already on the market, step motors are still subject to vibration, noise and harmonic resonance issues because of the way they are driven. Even today's microstepping motors can break tooling such as bits when operating at higher speeds, and often have chatter problems that create flaws when cutting arcs or circular shapes.