Motor performance

Lifetime

The design target for lifetime is 1000 hours operation at maximum current.

The graph below shows the results from a 666 hour lifetime experiment, based on a 30 mm diameter PCBMotor.

The experiment was set up using five motors, with a simple rotor construction, spring loaded at
4 N, with a 4 mm axel screw centered in FR-4 without bearings. Each motor was driven by an evaluation kit controller with tracking of the resonance frequency.

Results 

lifetime

 

Figur 1 – Lifetime Experiment at room temperature

In the above experiment, one motor required some time to settle. Most importantly, however, was the lack of any wear-out at the end of the experiment. Disassembly of the motors afterwards showed some wear of the friction layer, but still a lot of margin.

In most cases the customer application will require custom-designed rotor, bearing and spring constructions and it’s highly recommended to conduct lifetime experiments with the specific construction.

Note: Self-heating (power dissipation) occurs due to continuous operation. To keep the motor’s temperature below 70 degree celcius, a 50% duty cycle is recommended, for example one minute on, one minute off.

Torque, Speed, Power

The graph below shows the motor performance and relationship between torque, speed and power (based on a 30 mm diameter on-board PCBMotor).
Generally a higher pre-load of the rotors will result in lower speed but higher torque, so applications requiring speed rather than power, can benefit from a lower pre-load.

Results

Torque speed

 

Figur 2 – Drive current and spring force (Torque, Speed)

The motor characteristics for a sample 30 mm stator is given below measured at 200 Vrms.
Notice the nearly linear Torque/Speed relation.
Maximum available power at the shaft is 80 mW at a speed of 1 rev/s

torque power

Figur 3 – Results of Torque-Speed-Power experiment

Stall torque versus temperature

The graph below displays the motor’s performance under increasing temperatures.

The measurement was made on a 30 mm diameter PCBMotor in a temperature controlled oven.

Results

torque temperature

Figur 4 – Stall torque versus temperature

Extended environment testing
Preliminary testing using multiple motors operating in an extended environment temperature range from -10 to 85  ̊C has been performed with promising results.

Prev Chapter 2 – The two motors: STEP versus PCBMotor

Next Chapter 4 – Industry applications and real world cases