A stepper motor is a unique type of DC electric motor that rotates in fixed steps of a certain number of degrees. Step size can range from 0.9 to 90°. It consists of a rotor and stator. In this case, the rotor is a permanent magnet, and the stator is made up of electromagnets (field poles). The rotor will move (or step) to align itself with an energized field magnet. If the field magnets are energized one after the other around the circle, the motor can be made to move in a complete circle.
Stepper motors are particularly useful in control applications because the controller
- Stepper motor can know the exact position of the motor shaft without the need of position sensors. This is done by simply counting the number of steps taken from a known reference position. Step size is determined by the number of rotor and stator poles.
- There is no cumulative error (the angle error does not increase, regardless of the number of steps taken). In fact, most stepper motor systems operate open-loop—that is, the controller sends the motor a determined number of step commands and assumes the motor goes to the right place. A common example is the positioning of the read/write head in a floppy disk drive.
- Steppers have inherently low velocity and therefore are frequently used without gear reductions. A typical unit driven at 500 pulses/second rotates at only 150 rpm.
- Stepper motors can easily be controlled to turn at 1 rpm or less with complete accuracy.
What is the microstepping?
Microstepping technique in stepper motor allows a stepper motor to take fractional steps, works by having two adjacent field poles energized at the same time, similar to half-steps described earlier. In microstepping the adjacent poles are driven with different voltage levels, as demonstrated in Figure .In this case, pole 1 is supplied with 3 V and pole 2 with 2 V, which causes the rotor to be aligned as shown—that is, three-fifths of the way to pole 1. Figure 8.27(b) shows the voltages (for poles 1 and 2) to get five microsteps between each “regular” step. The different voltages could be synthesized with pulse-width modulation (PWM). The most commonly used microstep increments are 1/5, 1/10, 1/16, 1/32, 1/125, and 1/250 of a full step. Another benefit of microstepping (for delicate systems) is that it reduces the vibrational “shock” of taking a full step—that is, taking multiple microsteps creates a more “fluid” motion.
Two other points on microstepping: It does not require a special stepper motor, only special control circuitry, and the actual position of the rotor (in a microstepping system) is very dependent on the load torque.
