Thursday, 23 February 2012

Selecting servomoters!

Servomotor Sizing and Application, a new book from the pen of Gary Kirkhof, brings together all the resources needed to analyse mechanisms for the purpose of selecting an appropriate servomotor. It is written for mechanical engineers engaged in the design of industrial machinery and is well suited to the control engineer because it illustrates practical servomotor applications. The book breaks the motor sizing process into its elementary topics and covers each in depth. It then brings it all back together with detailed examples.

Topics include kinematics, duty cycles, inertia, friction, and mechanics. The analysis of linkages is also discussed using the crank-arm and a two axis parallel robot as examples.

The Author
Gary Kirckof, P.E. has spent the bulk of his thirty-year career working with automated equipment and assembly lines. Servomotor Sizing and Application is a direct result of that experience. He is both a registered mechanical and electrical engineer and works for Beckhoff Automation as an application engineer.

His career started by writing and debugging the programs that ran the equipment. He would talk to the mechanical engineers who designed the equipment to find out how it was supposed to work, the sensors
they had specified, and so forth. He would then write the code for the control system and then bring the machines to life. It became quite clear to him that after power was first applied to the machines, every mistake, omission, and problem that occurred during the concept, design, and assembly process became his problem. There were many problems because the equipment was large custom machines and assembly lines. He had no desire to deal with these problems and had every desire to make his life easier, so to eliminate as many potential problems as he could, he became involved with every step of the process.

One of the problems he often encountered early in his career was undersized servomotors. Servomotors were relatively new to industrial machinery and not many people were familiar enough with them to properly select them. He was discouraged at the lack of available information so he started to compile every piece of information he could find. This book is the result of his research efforts and his experience working with servomotors, and he wishes for it to fill the still-existing information void and to be a useful resource.

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