Stepper motor pole physics question

Thread Starter

keithwins

Joined Jan 28, 2014
9
Hello,
I hope someone can help me (confirming my intuitions here, hopefully):
I am playing with stepper motor design/modification (small steppers ala 3d printers etc.).
I am curious about the electromagnet poles of the stator. Each pole is a serious of paired coils/cores, each a ferromagnetic core wrapped with a coil.
I think those cores are typically extensions of the one-piece-body that is the stator. Is that necessary, or can one have isolated/insulated (from each other) cores for each coil/pole?
I think they can be isolated, and I think I've seen that, but perhaps there's some eddy current consideration or some other reason they need to be connected.
Thanks for any insight.
 

MaxHeadRoom

Joined Jul 18, 2013
28,619
There is also basically two versions of stepper motor, Uni-polar and Bi-polar.
Unipolar, 6 coil terminals, Bi-Polar 4 coil terminals.
 

MrAl

Joined Jun 17, 2014
11,396
Hello,
I hope someone can help me (confirming my intuitions here, hopefully):
I am playing with stepper motor design/modification (small steppers ala 3d printers etc.).
I am curious about the electromagnet poles of the stator. Each pole is a serious of paired coils/cores, each a ferromagnetic core wrapped with a coil.
I think those cores are typically extensions of the one-piece-body that is the stator. Is that necessary, or can one have isolated/insulated (from each other) cores for each coil/pole?
I think they can be isolated, and I think I've seen that, but perhaps there's some eddy current consideration or some other reason they need to be connected.
Thanks for any insight.
Hello,

In magnetic coils with metal cores if you have one coil on the core you can get a certain magnetic strength out of it. If you have two coils on the same core you will get twice the strength out of it. Given that you can change the polarity of both coils, you can run them both such that the force increases. If you have just one coil you cant do that.
So without really understanding your question, that's some general idea what happens with coils and ferrous metal cores.
 
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