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Servo drive toughens up for military COTS duties

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Sep 24, 2007

Hardened drives can now be used to control rotary and linear motors/actuators in military applications and extreme industrial environments.

Copley has developed a rugged version of its proven Xenus offline servo drive with improved temperature, humidity, vibration and shock ranges to meet military COTS (commercial of the shelf) requirements, including MIL-STD-810.

The hardened Series R10 drives can now be used to control rotary and linear motors/actuators in military applications and extreme industrial environments.

The hardened drives operate in stand alone and networked operating modes, and respond to a variety of input formats, including step-and-direction commands for upgrading from stepper motors to high torque servomotors.

Operating modes also include indexing, point-to-point, PVT, PT, position, velocity and torque control, as well as electronic camming and gearing.

The drives are compatible with CANopen, RS422, and RS485 communications, operate on single-phase or three-phase 85 to 264V supplies, and deliver up to 3kW drive power.

Copley has developed extensive libraries of motion control software (Copley Motion Libraries) and software COM objects to make system development fast and simple.

The development of low level code to control a CANopen network of intelligent drives is eliminated.

All network housekeeping is taken care of automatically by a few simple commands linked into the user's Visual Basic, LabView or C++ application program.

Drive users can automate otherwise time-consuming system setup and commissioning functions with Copley's CME 2 software.

The software provides auto tuning of the amplifier's current loop, and auto phasing of Hall sensors for both rotary and linear motors and actuators.

With setup and tuning completed, the software settings are stored in the amplifier's nonvolatile Flash memory.

The R10 drives use the advanced carrier cancellation modulation (CCM) for utmost zero crossing linearity and ultra low ripple current, which occurs at twice the carrier (PWM) frequency.

Ripple frequency is 28kHz.

Current loop bandwidth is 2.5kHz.

The amplifier provides 15kHz current loop update rate (67us) and 3kHz (333us) position and velocity loop update rate.

R10 drives are available for peak current from 18 to 40A, and operate from 85 to 264V AC single- or three-phase line voltages.

R10 drives are housed in shielded enclosures measuring 65 x 137 x 192mm.

The drives are protected against overcurrent, overtemperature and incorrect operating voltages.

They are further protected from short circuits between outputs, from output to ground, against overcurrent, overtemperature and against incorrect operating voltages.

In addition, protection circuits guard against loss of signal from either the encoder or the motor's Hall sensors.

Built-in computation algorithms monitor the I2T heating effect of load current, enable a motor to run safely at its outer performance envelope.

In hardening the Xenus family for COTS military, aviation and marine applications, Copley has simultaneously created a drive for extreme industrial environments.

R10 drives handle the high temperatures of solar energy collection, oil refinery and steel foundry uses, plus the opposite extremes of arctic satellite tracking, industrial cold rooms, and refrigerated meat packing operations.

Model R10 also qualifies for oil rig use, shipboard cargo handling equipment and off-road vehicles, where resistance to shock and vibration are critical.