Welcome to the June edition of Power Systems Design Europe. PCIM will be opening its doors from the 11th to 13th of the month in the Nuremberg Messe. If your company is exhibiting there and has any news that will debut at the show, please drop me an email on ally@powersystemsdesign.com and I’ll try arrange a time to drop by on your stand.
The acronym PCIM stands for Power, Control and Intelligent Motion. All of those subjects are strongly linked, especially in the industrial market. In this month’s magazine, the Special Report is entitled ‘Motor Drives, Robotics & Controls’ and it will look at the technology behind those subjects. Electric motors have always been important devices used to turn electrical energy into mechanical power for all types of applications, from large to small. Electric motors are also very power hungry and use a significant proportion of the electricity we generate. As such, there has been a lot of innovation in the area to make motors more efficient. This is partly due to the need to save money, and partly to meet increasingly stringent legislation, which now includes the drive as well as the motor.
It is only efficiency that is important to designers building systems that use electric motors, reliability is also critically important for many applications. Most modern electric motors use electrical power to energize coils built around the stator in sequence to create a rotating magnetic field. Often, the coils are arranged in three separate phases, but if one phase has a fault, the motor will not run correctly. Our first special report feature looks at that problem and suggests a solution that will keep the motor running smoothly. Andrea Spampinato and Gianluigi Forte from STMicroelectronics detail how these faults can be detected, isolated and compensated for using a six-phase drive.
The second article in our Special Report comes from MOTEON and it looks at the automated test of the motor and its control electronics to detect any bugs and validate its operation in its intended application. Automated testing is quicker and more reliable than manual testing, and when done early enough in the process, it can save a significant amount of money.
Our final Special Report article this month comes from Omron and it describes how time-of-flight (ToF) sensors are the key to the safe deployment of collaborative robots, or cobots. As manufacturing and industry gets more automated, robots are being installed closer to human operatives. There are several different ways of implementing safety in cobots, but in the article, Fabrizio Petris describes the features that make TOF sensors better in the role.
As well as the articles in the Special Report, the issue also contains general articles of interest to power engineers in our Tech Focus section, as well as the latest news and views from the industry.
Best Regards
Ally Winning
European Editor, PSD
