Development Of Hybrid Stepper Motor Drive for Tiles Printing Machine

Abstract

In today’s era with growing demand towards motion control applications, it is necessary to develop a system which is accurate and cost effective. Servo and stepper systems are the basic building blocks of motion control applications. Servo motors are built with a precision encoder to monitor shaft position to produce smooth and accurate positioning applications. This high accuracy is achieved by paying more money for servo systems. However there are so many applications which only require a reasonable accuracy with a cost effective solution that is only provided by stepper motors. One such application includes Tiles Printing Machine in ceramic tiles industries. In ceramic tiles industries, whole process is continuous and the tiles are moving on a continuous line. The printing machine senses the tiles and positions it at center, then a printing head prints design over tiles and when next tile is sensed, previous tile is removed and next is moved at centre. So the stepper motor is widely used as positioning device in ceramic industries. The aim of this project work is to develop cost effective stepper motor drive for good performance in environment of ceramic industries. To achieve this bi-polar drive using P18F452 microcontroller is fabricated and tested.