Bipolar Stepper Motor Applications

Bipolar stepper motor is known by its open loop feedback system; this characteristic makes the user know the exact position of the system driven by the bipolar stepper motor without any sensor and closed loop.

This is why we find bipolar stepper motor on different fields like lasers fields, optics fields, printing fields ...etc.

Commercially bipolar stepper motor are used many devices and machines such as Computer Numerical Control (CNC), Robotic arms , Scanners, Printers, CD/DVD and Blu-ray readers ...etc.

As said before Computer Numerical Control (CNC) are based on two or three Bipolar Stepper Motor to control the axis’s position and gives to the industries an opportunity to sculpt some CAD designs into metal and glasses plats.

Their high reliability makes them favorite by constructors with an excellent response to starting, stopping, and reversing sense.

Although the advantage of the precision characteristic that enjoys stepper motors, the speed is its blame. Synchronous or asynchronous motors often reach 3000 rev/min easily, but bipolar stepper motor rarely exceeds 3000 rev/min and this with high quality motors equipped with ball bearings.

Another negative point of stepper motors is the mass that they load to be driven which it’s recommended to not to be heavy, usually between 3 Kg to 10 Kg (6.6 lbs to 22 lbs).

That’s why all devices controlled by stepper motors are use not very heavy. Therefore there is some technics to control such heavy axes with bipolar stepper motor, like distribute the weight between two or three motors to load those axes but the constructors should provide the totally synchronization in this case. The torque converter technics could also load those heavy axes. This technic may also improve the speed.

In general to control a bipolar stepper motor we have to use drivers which connect the control supply (5 to 24V) with the power supply (24 to 150V), there are different driver schema to use, here is two examples of control drivers: 

Robotic arms often use bipolar stepper motor to control their motion by a parametric program user from an API or an industry computer.

Usual scanners, printers or CD readers are controlled by an integrated circuit to control a unipolar stepper which its command are simple than bipolar and offer the same proprieties.