subject: Servo Drives - All about Them [print this page] Servo Drives - All about Them Servo Drives - All about Them
Servo drives, also known as servo or servo motors, are an electronic mechanism where an electrical input governs the position of the framework of the drive. The main purpose of the servo drives is to enhance the initial control function by a relatively feeble energy. Servo drives are not a new concept as it has been used for years and due to their small size they were generally been used by collectors and hobbyists to run radio controlled or remote controlled robots, toy cars as well as airplanes. One can even find these devices in industries such as food services and pharmaceutics where the machineries are designed to survive the harsher environments. These servo motors help the mechanism to maintain rigorous hygiene levels since they have high potential of corrosion due to increased temperature and pressure.
The servo drives come in two different types that are DC and AC. DC servos are used for lower current flows and the AC servo drives are built to control higher current flow such as in industrial machines.
Servo motors contain a circuitry constructed in it that helps in controlling the angle of the device by a coded signal through a position-able shaft that is arranged in different angular positions. As the signal changes, the position of the shaft also changes accordingly. And though they are smaller in size compared to the function they perform, they do not consume a lot of energy. Thus to reduce higher level of fault in any mechanism, servo motors are implanted which aid in optimizing the efficiency of the device.
Servo drives depend on one chief principle of comparative control which implies that the motors in any device will only operate till it completely accomplishes the work at hand. If the shaft has to move a little then the motors will function at a slower speed than when the shaft moves a greater deal. The control wire built within the servo transmits coded signals through the pulse-coded modulation to the shaft. With the help of this modulation the shaft identifies the direction in which it has to move to obtain a certain angle, depending on the time and interval of the pulse transmitted through the control wire. Thus, a 1.5 millisecond pulse modulation will compel the motors to turn to a right angle position whereas a pulse more than 1.5 will move the shaft to 180 degrees and a lesser one will turn the shaft to a 0 degree.
