Vortex TruDrive High Power and High Voltage Brushed DC Servo Motor Driver based on Chan SMC3A

     Today i will show you one of my servo motor drives that i have done a few years back. The drive name is Vortex TruDrive and version of V2.0 . This drive is designed and upgraded by myself based on ELM-Chan SMC3a servo controllers. Although passing so many years , we are still using him project.

At the orginal topic , there is a circuit schematic which published by Chan himself. The circuit is a bit old for nowadays and some having hard time to find components on it. And also the circuit doesn't have any protection and was not able to drive high power motors especially for industrial ones. Several years back from today , my retro Matsuura CNC motor controllers went wrong and unable to repair. The cnc has 3 axis of beautifull Yaskawa Electric Minertia Motor J Series. Those motors has 112V 11.5A 1100W of power rating. When old drives are dead , i was looking for alternative solution for cnc. Because of that reason, i decided to upgrade SMC3A drive to the high voltage , high power one.  So i builded my own STEP & DIR control closed loop servo drive succesfully. 

The drive (Vortex TruDrive) has a capabile of drive 600Vdc , 15Amps of power loads with presicion and has high speed overcurrent protection with noise filtered operational amplifiers. This makes this drive trustable even at unwanted conditions happened on your parameter settings or your control signals. STEP & DIR signals are galvanically isolated by opto's which makes your system is protected from driver side high voltage bus and floating ground points. Orginal code was not able to put some deadtime on the modulation signals. Although for this purpose , Chan has been used some old special product for adding some deadtime on the modulation. Today this componant is not able to find easily and not compatible for driving high power IGBT's. So i have added 3uS delay time of each modulation signals for shootthrough protection of the drive. So on , i have upgraded many thing before building this drive. 

Today i'm still using Vortex drive on my Matsuura CNC , UNION Bohrwerk  and some of my bench cnc machines that i have build. Most of my drive are controlling by Mesa board via LinuxCNC. Others has controllers like Mach3. 

Parameter setting is a bit od and requires to much time for it. But if you cach it , it worths. Even there is no auto tuning option for this drive , it can be easily find out the right parameter for your motor at low voltages. But i admit it ,  at high voltage motors or at heavy loaded motors , it is too much nesty because of high magnetic flux density. Yet it's perfect for smooth control.

 Techinal Details:

1)Max Operating Voltage: 600Vdc

2)Max Operating Current: 15A (can be upgrade up to 35A)

3)Overcurrent Protection: Shunt resistor based (internally limited to 11.5A)

4)Over Temperature Protection : Internally limited to 140 Celcius at junction temperature

5)Shootthrough Protection

6)Galvanically Isolated  Control Inputs

7) Reverse Polarity Protection

8)Short Circuit Protection

9)LED Indicators

10)Internal Voltage Regulator

11)Reduced Parasitic Noises

 

Here is the driver with attached heatsink:

Here is the motor and feedback unit that drive successfully on my retro Matsuura:

Here is the power supply for those motors:

If you are looking for this drive i'm here to help you with it. For extra small amount of tea price , i will gladly sell it to you..

If you have questions about this drive , feel free to contact me on: gogendevices@gmail.com

Thank you.