Nowadays, designing new products is becoming more and more complex, and there are many regulations on safety and environmental impact. Environmental impact assessments often address issues such as energy efficiency, chemical composition and recyclability, but more and more designers may soon add acoustical performance to the key factors they consider.
It is not a new problem to focus on the noise that we use. The World Health Organization believes that community noise can be traced back to civilization as an environmental problem. Since the adoption of the Noise Abatement Act 1960 by the British parliament, excessive noise has been a legal problem for the United Kingdom.
Retailer John Lewis recently found that 49% of UK consumers use sound as an important consideration when buying appliances. Some well-known brands are getting real-time news and have launched new products from the Quiet Mark EcoDesign Award Program approved by the Noise Canceling Association. Quiet Mark tests the products submitted by the manufacturer and awards Purple Q labels to products that meet OEM quiet requirements. We can see in our favorite shops more and more big brand products brightly close to the Quiet Mark Purple Q.
Q means quiet: consumer brands make their products stand out in the store shelves in another way.
There is no doubt that some buyers are willing to pay for the latest and quietest technology. Even so, OEMs must carefully consider the cost of designing, or redesigning, and bill of materials when creating a new product. In all markets, not only consumer appliances, as well as office and industrial equipment are so. Quieter home, quieter office, quieter factory: quieter life. The prospect is attractive, but the cost?
Many types of equipment for home and work, such as printers, scanners, sewing machines, point-of-sale terminals, industrial drives, etc., rely on stepper motors to provide low-cost movement, relatively easy to control without the need for a processor or microcontroller To implement the complex field-oriented algorithms required for brushless DC (BLDC) motors. The compromise is higher noise when the motor is continuously stepping at high speed.
Until now, the only way to win that violet - or, in short, to create a quieter industrial device to distinguish it from the competition - has been to design alternative stepper motors such as BLDC. This involves some additional costs: not only can the controller be more expensive, but also the cost of redesigning the device, resubmitting the relevant tests, and then preparing the new document and collecting the reliability data.
ON Semiconductor's new stepper motor control strategy is more energy efficient, smoother, more quiet, the same as the movement of BLDC, just in the circuit design for minor changes. The key lies in the new technology to provide variable speed current control, replacing the traditional fixed current step mode.
ON Semiconductor's LC898240 high-efficiency stepper motor controller combines these innovations, as a traditional stepper motor-driven auxiliary chip, just a slightly redesigned driver board. The LC898240 is connected to the motor windings to sense load conditions and to generate a signal to regulate the drive current. The step pulse and the set current output are connected to the STEP and VREF pins of the conventional stepper motor driver, respectively.
The LC898240 can also be used in conjunction with microcontrollers, depending on the requirements. Designers keen to save extra board space can now implement all of this with the LV8702V in conjunction with a current controller / driver IC, enabling energy-efficient single-chip solutions for stepper motor drives. These new devices also greatly reduce the power consumption of conventional motor drives at light loads.
