A new family of Neat linear motor positioners designed to meet the demands of photonic alignment and assembly systems, including cleanroom applications, has been introduced by Heason
Called FiberBeam, this family of air bearing-based linear motor positioners offers 1 micron moves and settle times of 15m/sec to within one nanometre.
Maximum travels are 20, 50, and 100mm.
The low-profile positioners (50mm) incorporate a unique moving magnet/moving glass design.
This configuration comprises moving magnets and encoder scale, with the coil, scale reading head, cables and connectors remaining stationary inside the base thereby avoiding any cable influence on carriage movement as it floats over a featureless, precision-ground base.
The FiberBeam stages feature proprietary porous bearing technology, avoiding the clogging problems common to orifice bearing designs.
All models bolt together directly to form X-Y assemblies without the need for adapter plates.
The height of such a stack is a low l00mm.
In addition, right angle brackets and frictionless spring or air counterbalances are available to permit vertical operation.
This allows three axis X-Y-Z assemblies to be easily configured.
Dual carriage/single base versions can also be supplied, where the motion of the two carriages is parallel to less than two arc-seconds.
In constant velocity applications, tracking errors during motion can be held to +/- 10 nanometers. The use of a single phase, brushless motor in the FiberBeam 20 stage provides the high performance of sinusoidal commutation from brush-type amplifiers - with no commutation required.
For high-resolution applications demanding rapid settling, the FiberBeam Stages are an ideal match to the Neat NanoDrive linear amplifier series of ultra-low noise and low distortion sinusoidal amplifiers.
