Equipment Solutions offers many standard, off-the-shelf, linear voice coil stages. These stages can be quickly categorized by a few key parameters including the aperture size if it has one, the range of motion, the motors force constant, how the motors rotor is guided and finally the type of position sensor.

In most cases one of the above servo amplifiers will be a good match for the capabilities of any of the Equipment Solutions linear or rotary stages.  After reviewing the above if you are still unsure which product might be the best fit for your application please do not hesitate to contact us by phone or email. We would be happy to help guide you to the best solution and if one does not exist we can discuss the possibility of a custom solution.

Low Moving Mass

Nearly all Equipment Solutions stages use a voice coil motor architecture. For applications requiring less than 50 millimeters of high speed motion a voice coil is ideal. Having a single phase winding the voice coil motor is much lighter than its longer stroke three phase stages or moving magnet voice coils. Making the moving mass smaller produces higher accelerations and average speed for a given input current.

To further reduce the moving mass some Equipment Solutions stages use flexure bearings, one of the lightest bearing technologies available. Together, the combination forms one of the most highly efficient translation stages available today.

Stiction & Friction Free Flexure Guidance

Most Equipment Solutions stages use a flexure bearing to guide the moving coil and the user load. A flexure bearing is a guidance means that allows motion with none of the troublesome stiction or friction found in a typical ball, roller or bushing bearing stages. Void of those effects, stage positioning is both more precise and more stable. With no friction or stiction to contend with step-and-settle speeds are allowed to approach noise free theoretical limits.  Unlike friction based bearings, properly designed flexures can literally have infinite life.

Balanced Load

Equipment Solutions Voice Coil Stages are all designed to place The coaxial guidance and force axes pass directly through the moving center of mass and the users load. Placing the load in this position will eliminate the possibility of tipping or tilting the load during accelerations. It also prevents other components in the motion train from ringing and negatively affecting servo stability and characteristics like step-and-settle times.

Compact Design

Since a voice coil motor has only a single phase or winding it is inherently smaller than any three phase motor.

Many Equipment Solutions stages use a flexure bearing for coil and load guidance. Use of a flexure bearing will yield the smallest motion axis footprint when compared to any other bearing technology including ball and rollers.

High Resolution Position Sensor

All standard stages from Equipment Solutions include a high-resolution, non-contact, electro-optic analog position sensor. Because this sensor is analog, it is noise limited. With standard noise filtering this sensor can repeatably report a stage position to within 50 nanometers.

Stage Guidance

Equipment Solutions produces motorized linear stages that can be sub divided into two main catagories based on the motion guidance technology they use. This section is provided to help highlight the unique advantages of each.

Roller or Ball Bearings

High Cross-Axis Stiffness: When compared to flexures, bearings provide a means to more rigidly couple the stage to its reference frame. That coupling makes the servo more immune from external perturbations such as vibration and oscillating loads induced by offset loads that generate torques. Under such extreme conditions system performance can exceed that normally achieved by systems using flexures.

Motion Purity: A bearing stage will only deviate from from its straight line motion by an amount described by the tolerances of the bearings themselves. By contrast, a flexure stage will almost always have at least one orthogonal axis where some parasitic motion is imparted into.

Flexures

Light Weight: When contrasted to most other guidance systems including bearings, flexures are significantly lighter. Being lighter allows more of the motors force to be converted to acceleration. That higher acceleration can then translate into higher peak velocities.  It can also allow the servo to operate at a higher bandwidth that in turn can improve position repeatability and settling time performance.

Infinite Life: When designed correctly, flexures can bend a prescribed amount without fatigue. This is in direct contrast to roller or ball bearings which rely on friction, all be it rolling, to define the motion path.  That friction directly translates to wear which in turn describes the finite life available from the bearing.  Small repetitive motions are well known to accelerate the failure time of ball or roller bearings.  When high accelerations are included, which can cause the ball or roller to slip or skid, it will cause life estimates to be significantly lowered.  Under conditions such as this, that include short repetitive motions and high accelerations, a flexure design should be prominently considered.

Friction Free Motion: By nature a flexure design does not include any  friction or stiction.  That lack of force non-linearities allows the system to control positioning with much higher resolution.