Archive for February, 2008

Motors, R&D and Politics

Steve Meyer
February 23rd, 2008.

The “Green Revolution” is under way. Regardless of how you rationalize it, there is a lot of activity around reducing the amount of energy being consumed in almost every aspect of American life. For the most part, its well intentioned. As good stewards of the resources we have, we should use them responsibly.

Energy conservation has been an active part of the mechatronics world for some time. The variable frequency drive, now  a $1B+/year product is marketed and sold because of its ability to reduce electrical consumption in about 1/3 of all applications. So we who are part of the drives and controls community have been in the vanguard of energy conservation for many years. An often overlooked fact. We’ve been “Green” for decades.

Some years ago, the Department of Energy spent hundreds of millions of dollars attempting to increase the energy efficiency of the electric motor. They tried to stimulate fundamental R&D with research into high performance lamination steels and superconducting wire. Remember superconducting? Going to change the world. Someday. That day hasn’t come. Motors with superior lamination materials are available but at a cost premium. So we didn’t get a big energy return on our DOE investment. And the incremental increase that high grade laminations provide isn’t enough to justify the expense for the most part. Otherwise, ALL motors would have exotic laminations.
State governments are poised to mandate that manufacturers use some proportion of high efficiency motors to get reductions in power consumption. Instead of building more powerplants or using nuclear mini-reactors to make more power available. Hey, let’s pile on more regulations and costs to our manufacturing sector and see if they survive. Bad idea.

Let’s pass a law that electric motor manufacturers make more efficient motors and let them figure it out. Another Bad Idea. Electric motors are extremely efficient already. Most motors run 80-90% efficient. That’s why electric cars are a great idea. In that situation its not the motors that are the problem, its the battery. But that’s another story.

You can’t just pass a law and get more efficiency. There are physical limits. Politicians generally don’t have technical backgrounds, and by getting involved in the R&D process they can make a real mess.

The American public pays more than $7Bil a year for the DOE to do whatever it does, and from the projects I am aware of, the benefit we get from those expenditures is minimal. We need to get some people from our industry involved in the DOE process who can inject some informed common sense into the situation. The solutions are available, they are just not making it through the bureacracy.

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Time and Technology March On

Steve Meyer
February 20th, 2008.

Motion Control used to be its own unique domain in the control world. People tended to leave you alone. Few understood it. And because there were so many problems, many avoided it. Don’t get hooked up with to it.

So control most of the major technologies grew up on their own. CNC’s first developed in the 1950’s were definitely their own thing. Very complex math engines that were used to manage metal cutting operations to make complex strucutres. Modern aircraft would be pretty much impossible without the incredible precision available through CNC’s.

Process Computers were full mainframe computers with totally unique hardware for operating chemical refineries. Wire trays with miles and miles of wire running through process plants with ever increasing demands for information.

PLC’s are relatively recent control platforms that gained great popularity since my introduction to them in the 1980’s. And they have migrated dramatically since then. Equipment that used to fill relay racks, like their process control cousins, is now available in a lunch box style rack.

And variable frequency drives, also a relatively recent technology, have seen cost and size improvements that are astounding. Today’s 1HP drive is available from Asia at $100 selling price and they are small enough to fit in the palm of your hand.

Enter the personal computer. Once the domain of early information systems programmers, now are the platform for the control systems they once monitor data from. The top CNC’s of today are shipping on PC processors.

Process control on PLC? Never! Really? Honeywell migrated its process controller platform to the Rockwell Logix platform a few years ago. Motion Control on a PLC 20 years ago would have been unheard of. Now, everyone claims to be able to do motion in the PLC.

So where is all this going? Processor technology is getting cheaper. Any application will be fair game for a less expensive processor with much greater capability. Soft motion? Soft PLC? Sure!

What we need to consider is the value that control industry products bring. Not the hardware specs, but what the product does for the customer. The customer’s value.

That’s what industry professionals bring to the relationship, seeking the customer’s best value. That’s how we win, now and in the future.

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My first brush with Mechatronics came courtesy of White Sands Missile Range

Larry Boulden
February 19th, 2008.

Imagine a missile launch,” my boss explained.  “It comes out of the silo without warning, goes like a streak, and sometimes explodes on launch.  We want an unmanned tracking mount that will sit close to the launch area, pick up the missile, and track it  — no matter what.”

The engineering assignment was pure Mechatronics.  Make the mechanical pieces strong but light enough for the accelerations and slew rates to come.  Give the drives enough power, speed, and responsiveness. Make sure the sensors could pick up the bird, lock on it and follow it to the death.  Fashion controls that would tie it all together and make it all work.

It was, in short, classic Mechatronics, though we never used that word.  It would be two years later, in 1969, before Tetsuro Mori, a senior engineer at Yaskawa, coined it.  But how the practice of Mechatronics, and the engineering disciplines it uses, have grown in the years since then.

According to Wikipedia, Mechatronics is the synergistic combination of mechanical, electronic, and software engineering.  The purpose of this interdisciplinary engineering field is the study of automated machines from an engineering perspective.

The “automated machines” so created range from planetary rovers to production machines, from automotive subsystems like antilock braking to synergy drives.  And yes, the roster of Mechatronics successes includes a bevy of common consumer products such as autofocus cameras, CD-players, washing machines, and hard drives for computers.

A measure of its acceptance can be inferred from the number of efforts to broaden the definition.  Leading firms like National Instruments would like to see emphasis on testing as a key part of Mechatronics.  Dr. Sugato Deb of NI notes that the common definition of Mechatronics does not include testing, and concludes, “Perhaps it should.”

Another area of interest is in linking hydraulic and pneumatic components into Mechatronics systems.  Paolo Catterina of EUROelectronics has been using NI controls in designing a high-speed press based on a hydraulic cylinder.  EUROelectronics is a machine builder that was asked to design a closed-loop hydraulic-cylinder control system for a die-casting press machine. At a recent Mechatronics event, Catterina explained. “The high-speed press moves anywhere from 0 to 10 m/s and therefore requires a high-speed control system. Position and pressure control of a hydraulic cylinder is a common application in the industrial automation field, but the precision control of such systems has traditionally presented significant challenges because of their high speeds and pressures.”

Here at Design World, we regard Mechatronics as one of the most challenging and exciting subjects we cover.   We hope you’ll visit our Project Mechatronics Website, www.projectmechatronics.com, and check out our blog, our Wiki, and the rest of the coverage we offer.  While you’re there, we suggest you log on and add your comments to the Wiki.  We welcome your contributions to Project Mechatronics.

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Mechatronics’ Present and Future

Richard Comerford
February 01st, 2008.

Having just gotten back from the annual extravaganza known as the Consumer Electronics Show, I’m happy to report that the outlook for mechatronics is definitely positive. The integration of electronics and mechanical systems was clearly in evidence at CES, on both the micro and macro level.

To start small, one of the more impressive in-suite demos was presented by Microvision of Redmond, WA. The company has developed what it calls the PicoP engine for projecting video and images onto any reflective surface. The engine consists of a MEMS chip with a mirror that can steer RGB laser light to raster the image onto the surface. An entire system was contained in a case about the size of an iPod. There were also a lot of new game controllers that rely upon the ability to sense motion to provide an extra dimension to gaming, as well as hepatic feed back systems to let you feel the pain.

At the other end of the size spectrum, there were the huge MEMS micromirror projection systems in the Texas Instruments booth. There were also several concept cars from Ford demonstrating the use of electronic systems for control of steering, abs, air-bags, and other critical systems that were once strictly mechanical. This list could continue to grow, but it’s clear that the marriage of electronics and mechanics is still on very solid footing.

I also saw a number of display systems, and while they didn’t rely on mechanics in the larger sense, it was their physical performance that started me thinking about the future of mechatronics. What I was hearing is that this one type of display system, while its appearance was excellent, was having problems related to material stability over time. It was critical to the products success, yet it was something that was only found out once many, many units were in production.

Today we are at a stage where we can simulate the interaction of mechanical and electronic systems with a good degree of accuracy. But when it comes to the performance of materials over time, or in a particular design for that matter, we seem to still be in the dark ages. The materials/chemical engineer can use his or her expertise to suggest what is likely to happen, and has tools for creating new molecular compounds, but I know of no system today that will allow you to integrate that knowledge into the realm of electromechanical design.

Once we’ve tackled the problems that mechatronics poses to unifying electromechanical design, I hope we’ll be able to take the next step into materials science and bring in the ability to alter or design new materials that will fulfill the end requirements of product in new and unique ways. But I guess we have to learn to walk before we can run (and after having been all over the huge Las Vegas Convention Center for CES, I’m happy for now to still be able to walk).

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