Linear Stages - Equip solutions

MzEquipment Solutions offers many standard, off-the-shelf, linear voice coil stages. These stages can be quickly catagorized by a few key parameters including the aperture size if it has one, the range of motion, the motors force constant, how the motors rotor is guided and finally the type of position sensor.

Low Moving Mass	Nearly all Equipment Solutions stages use a voice coil motor architecture. For applications requiring less than 50 millimeters of high speed motion a voice coil is ideal. Having a single phase winding the voice coil motor is much lighter than its longer stroke three phase bretheren. Making the moving mass smaller produces higher accelerations and average speed for a given input current. To further reduce the moving mass some Equipment Solutions stages use flexure bearings, one of the lightest bearing technologies available. Togethher, the combination forms one of the most highly efficient translation stages available today.
Stiction & Friction Free Flexure Guidance	Several Equipment Solutions stages use a flexure bearing to guide the moving coil and the user load. A flexure bearing is a bearing that allows motion by bending a load element. Flexure bearings have none of the troublesome stiction or friction found in a typical ball or roller bearing stages. Void of those effects, stage positioning is both more precise and more stable. With no friction or stiction to contend with step-and-settle speeds are allowed to approach noise free theoretical limits.
Balanced Load	Equipment Solutions Voice Coil Stages are all designed to place the users load directly over the force axis. Placing the load in this position will eliminate the possibility of tipping or tilting the load during accelerations. It also prevents other components in the motion train from ringing and negatively affecting servo stability and characteristics like step-and-settle times.
Compact Design	Since a voice coil motor has only a single phase or winding it is inherenitly smaller than any three phase motor. Many Equipment Solutions stages use a flexure bearing for coil and load guidance. Use of a flexure bearing will yield the smallest motion axis fottprint when compared to any other bearing thechnology including ball and rollers.
High Resolution Position Sensor	All standard stages from Equipment Solutions include a high-resolution, non-contact, electro-optic analog position sensor. Becuase this sensor is analog, it is noise limited. With standard noice filtering this sensor can repeatably report a stage position to within 200 nanometers.