Haydon has designed an advanced series of drivers to efficiently operate motors to their peak performance. With several options to select from, Haydon can help you set up a system that will power-up any application. HSI unipolar/bipolar drives are supported by HSI’s outstanding customer application assistance.

The unipolar motor has 6 leads (center-tapped coils). This type of arrangement is electronically simple to operate. However, as compared to the bipolar motor, performance is reduced to 70% since only half of the copper is used at any one time.

The bipolar motor has 4 leads and gets maximum performance. This arrangement, however, requires reversing the current in each motor phase which makes the electronics a little more elaborate.

Drives are available from stock and are ideal for the initial as well as production phases of your project. HSI motors will deliver rated performances when controlled by these drivers.

Drives

All Haydon Drives Offer a Half Step Mode.

Stepper motors require some external electrical components in order to run. These components typically include a power supply, logic sequencer, switching components and a clock pulse source to determine the step rate. Many commercially available drives have integrated these components into a complete package. Some basic drive units have only the final power stage without the controller electronics to generate the proper step sequencing.

Bipolar Drive

This is a very popular drive for a two phase bipolar motor having four leads. In a complete driver/controller the electronics alternately reverse the current in each phase. The stepping sequence is shown in figure 5.

Unipolar Drive

This drive requires a motor with a center-tap at each phase (6 leads).
Instead of reversing the current in each phase, the drive only has to switch current from one coil to the other in each phase (figure 6). The windings are such that this switching reverses the magnetic fields within the motor. This option makes for a simpler drive but only half of the copper winding is used at any one time. This results in approximately 30% less available torque in a rotary motor or force in a linear actuator as compared to an equivalent bipolar motor.

L/R Drives

This type of drive is also referred to as a constant voltage drive. Many of these drives can be configured to run bipolar or unipolar stepper motors. L/R stands for the electrical relationship of inductance (L) to resistance (R). Motor coil impedance vs. step rate is determined by these parameters. The L/R drive should “match” the power supply output voltage to the motor coil voltage rating for continuous duty operation. Most published motor performance curves are based on full rated voltage applied at the motor leads. Power supply output voltage level must be set high enough to account for electrical drops within the drive circuitry for optimum continuous operation.

Performance levels of most steppers can be improved by increasing the applied voltage for shortened duty cycles. This is typically referred to as “over-driving” the motor. When over-driving a motor, the operating cycle must have sufficient periodic off time (no power applied) to prevent the motor temperature rise from exceeding the published specification.

Chopper Drives

A chopper drive allows a stepper motor to maintain greater torque or force at higher speeds than with an L/R drive. The chopper drive is a constant current drive and is almost always the bipolar type. The chopper gets its name from the technique of rapidly turning the output voltage on and off (chopping) to control motor current. For this setup, low impedance motor coils and the maximum voltage power supply that can be used with the drive will deliver the best performance. As a general rule, to achieve optimum performance, the recommended ratio between power supply voltage and rated motor voltage should be at least eight to one.  Unless stated otherwise an eight to one ratio was used for the performance curves in this catalog.

Microstepping Drives

Many bipolar drives offer a feature called microstepping. Microstepping electronically divides a full step into smaller steps. For instance, if one step of a linear actuator is 0.001 inch, this can be driven to have 10 microsteps per step. In this case, one microstep would normally be 0.0001 inch. Microstepping effectively reduces the step increment of a motor. However, the accuracy of each microstep has a larger percentage of error as compared to the accuracy of a full step. As with full steps, the incremental errors of microsteps are non-cumulative.

Motor with Drive

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