Spindle Drive

This website gives a short overview of electrical machines used as high speed spindle drives. Furthermore, the challenges of developing and manufacturing spindle drives are explained. With e+a located in Switzerland, there is a competent partner with more than 28 years of experience in designing and producing customized asynchronous and synchronous spindle motor elements, especially for high speed applications.

Introduction

Various requirements are actually leading to a growing demand for high speed spindle drives. First of all, the continuous need for an increased power density. Due to the quasi linear relation between rotational speed and shaft power of an electrical machine, increasing the rated speed is an effective way to boost power density and efficiency. Hence this approach takes advantage of increasing shaft power without changing the size of the spindle. On the other hand, the same performance can be provided in a smaller volume. The latter is paramount in the field of machine tool applications for example. Thus spindles or the machine tool in a whole become smaller, weight is reduced and dynamical behavior is enhanced. Another point in this industry is the cycle time that a machine tool needs to complete a specific operation. The faster a tool can be moved and rotated the faster it is able to complete its task, not taking into account that high speed cutting operation rely on top speed to machine time efficiently respective parts.

Challenges

The mentioned advantage of high speed spindle drives can only be achieved by using high quality spindle drive elements. The reason for that is that due to the high rotational speeds, the centrifugal forces on the rotating motor part (rotor) can be very high leading the materials to the edge of mechanical stress resistivity. Failures in motor elements can result in crashes affecting the environment or at least damage the system, where the generator is built in. To prevent this, various physical aspects need to be calculated in a challenging development process, taking electromagnetic, thermal, mechanical stress and structure dynamic aspects into account. The applied computational methods need to be combined with a long experience, to extend actual operation limitations with keeping safety in mind as highest priority. Furthermore, the interaction of the rectifier and the spindle drive needs to be known, because the rectifier has a deep impact on heating, noise, clogging, and efficiency of the generator. Especially the interaction of various converter systems with a high speed spindle drive element demands very specific knowledge and experience. Hence tests of above described applications are crucial to succeed. They require an intense relation between the power electronic and high speed generator specialists. Furthermore the infrastructure enabling performance tests are highly complex and usually not available on the market. Very often the related costs exceed by far the costs incurred during the whole development process of a new motor element product line.

Inverter

Typical inverters are working on base of the pulse wide modulation method, where a continuous switching of voltage or current controls the output waveform. Due to the need for faster spindle drives, the switching frequency increases as well (in modern inverters, IGBT's are used). Although noise and efficiency improve as the number of pulses increase, the inverter leads also to a few drawbacks, especially because of fast switching transients which can be understood as a significant source of stray losses. Additional time harmonics caused by a switching mode inverter has a negative impact on the air gap flux distribution. These harmonics cause additional eddy current losses in the spindle drive especially in the rotor, which lead to higher temperatures and a possible degrade of the mechanical behavior. The switching frequency has another impact on the high speed spindle drive, namely on the insulation, which is severely stressed by the repetition and the steepness of the pulse wave front. When IGBTs are used, the high rate of voltage rise of typically 0 - 650 V in less than 0.1 ｵs leads to approximately 10,000 V/ｵs. This fact results in adverse effects on the spindle motor insulation. These steep rising and falling pulses lead to an uneven distribution of voltages within the motor, especially during switching transitions. Without a deep knowledge of the spindle drive insulation system and the inverter itself an insulation deterioration and subsequent failure of the generator can occur. In this context partial discharge effects and rotor over heating are well known failure sources. The latter can lead to an unwanted carbon fiber burst due to thermal or mechanical stress in the respective resin carbon fiber compound (synchronous machines).

Conclusion

Asynchronous and synchronous high speed spindle drives offer several advantages like decreased installation space for higher power and weight optimized spindles. Designing and producing these asynchronous and synchronous high speed spindle drives is an exciting task, where the usage of most modern computational methods for the development process is as important as a wide range of experience and expertise to extend actual operation limitations in a safe way. Not only is the knowledge of high speed spindle drives necessary but also a deep inside in inverter technology, partial discharge phenomenon and so called stray or additional loss.

e+a in Switzerland offers a wide product portfolio of high speed motors or generators respectively. With more than 28 years of experience and more than 150,000 different high speed induction machines and permanent magnet synchronous machines running, e+a is one of the world leaders in developing and manufacturing highly customized high speed spindle motors. Furthermore, a professional equipped test bench with all the newest inverters and a partial discharge test system allows detailed analysis and adaptation of rectifier and motor and a very well support for system integrators.