(Commonwealth Union)_The fourth Industrial Revolution is fundamentally altering the face of production, with new demands for more facility design flexibility, capital cost savings, and energy efficiency. However, many technological challenges remain in the way of completely fulfilling this vision. To date, the majority of emphasis has been concentrated on the creation of software required for security, AI, and machine communications. Hardware innovation now requires equal consideration. Significant hardware innovation is required for the millions of motors and motor drives, robots and robotics that are required in more automated industrial settings. Failure to do so could hinder future progress in the development of manufacturing.
Over 300 million motors are embedded in systems such as robotic arms, conveyor belts, packaging and fabrication machines, handling and assembly systems, pumps, and fans. They play an invisible, but extremely strong, role in the industrial sector, and their numbers are expanding by the day. Nonetheless, they pose hurdles to the manufacturing industry due to their existing energy inefficiency and design constraints.
Industrial motors today are inefficient in terms of energy consumption. They use two-thirds of the energy used in industry and lose 10-30% of that in inefficient power conversion. This is a costly problem not only for individual manufacturing plants, but for the industrial sector as a whole, which consumes 40-50 percent of the world’s electricity.
Consumer groups and government agencies are putting increasing pressure on governments to reduce global pollution levels caused by growing energy output.
The existing size and performance of motor drives (the devices that harness and control the energy provided to the motor) do not give the flexibility required by forward-thinking manufacturing operations. New motor drive designs are required to allow for the integration of external functions such as filters, the use of longer unshielded cables, and the increased control bandwidth required for faster response times and higher precision positioning of many motors in robotic systems.
The use of GaN power semiconductors in industrial motor drives provides a substantial potential to overcome the energy inefficiency and design restrictions caused by the usage of older IGBT-based solutions. Because of the potential to reduce or eliminate the heat sink in a power system, motor drives can be substantially smaller and more easily embedded in other systems. GaN’s higher frequencies and faster switching capabilities also provide the enhanced control bandwidth required for the fast reaction and highly precise positioning required in robotics when driving many motors at the same time.
