Studies on thrust characteristics of high-thrust spiral motor

Linear actuators are used in various industrial applications. Conventional linear actuators are a combination of a rotational motor and a ball screw, a hydraulic actuator, or a linear motor. However, these actuators have some demerits. This paper proposes a spiral motor (SPRM) that comprises a helical stator and a helical mover. Owing to its helical structure, the SPRM can be expected to show better performance compared to the conventional linear actuator. A stator and a mover are shown in Figs. 1 and 2, respectively. Helical motion is obtained by this motor and only linear motion is extracted by canceling rotational motion at the end effector. There are two types of SPRMs. One has no ball screw on the output axis, while the other has a ball screw. The former can be used in a direct drive system. However, the gap between the stator and the mover should be controlled because the motor is a magnetic levitation system without a ball screw. Further, the motor requires two three‐phase inverters. The other motor is easy to control because it does not require gap control. However, the motor is inferior to the first motor with regard to position control since the friction in this motor is larger. In this study, a prototype of the SPRM is developed. The prototype constructed is a motor with a ball screw. In this motor, the stator and mover are made of block cells. The stator block is shown in Fig. 3 and the mover block is shown in Fig. 4. The prototype of the SPRM shown in Fig. 5, is developed by using these two blocks. An experiment is conducted to examine the driving of the SPRM. The experimental result is shown in Fig. 6. From this result, it is evident that comprising a helical stator and a helical mover can generate linear motion. Another experiment is conducted for measuring the thrust characteristic of the motor. The result obtained is shown in Fig. 7. From the figure, the thrust constant of the spiral motor, Kf, is obtained as 538.0 N/A. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electr Eng Jpn, 177(2): 58–64, 2011; Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI 10.1002/eej.21168