Experimental activities on step motor drives

Thanks to their robustness, reliability and ease of use, step motor drives are widely used in several fields, mainly for small size automation. Step motor drives have also some well known bad running conditions related to their oscillatory behaviour and synchronism loss. In order to properly design the application, those conditions must be accurately taken into account setting-up proper mathematical models. In particular in this paper we refer to a simplified electro-mechanical model where the most of the parameters can be drawn from datasheets, while the others, as the equivalent damping factor, need experimental investigation. This paper deals with preliminary experimental activities performed on small size step motor drives for both testing the suitability of a test bench designed and developed in previous works, and outlining some remarks on the behaviour of the tested motors.