Today’s emerging trends and new developments provide a guide to how servos are likely to advance in the coming years. Mitsubishi Electric UK’s new MR-J4 servos are made more usable by place-in the focus on ease of installation, energy efficiency, safety and productivity.

The MR-J4 motors range is available in 200V and 400V and includes power ratings from 100W to 22kW. The MR-J4 servo motors are designed for compliance with either IP65 (dustproof), IP67 (wash-down) or to food and beverage hygiene standards.

Ease of installation

One of the most time consuming parts of any servo system is tuning the servo motor to the machine and this requires both training and experience.  It is made more usable by giving the servo amplifier the intelligence to do this tuning the commissioning time is reduced. The new MR-J4 Servo amplifier achieves this with a one-touch tuning function whereby the servo amplifier tunes the machine automatically detecting and filtering machine resonance points to suppress machine vibration. The amplifier can be set to continually adjust as resonance points change over the life of the machine.

The MR-J4 Machine Diagnosis Function monitors the condition of  both internal components such as capacitors and relays, and external components like the bearings, belts or ball screws. It notifies the user of any degradation in operation to avoid unplanned downtime and unnecessary maintenance. In the case of an alarm, the  maintenance engineer receives full diagnostic information.

Accuracy is one of the main reasons for selecting servo systems. The MR-J4 amplifiers are fitted with 22-bit absolute encoders to provide a resolution of over 4 million pulses per revolution. This not only increases accuracy but gives a smoother motor rotation, to reduce cogging.

Safe operation

Functional safety requirements are evolving and becoming more demanding. Embedding the safety on the amplifiers gives greater flexibility in its use and also reduces machine start-up times after the cause of the safety stoppage has been resolved. The MR-J4 amplifiers have an integrated two-channel STO (Safe Torque Off) input. This can be augmented by an additional option module to provide SS1 (Safe Stop) input in line with EN61800-5-2. The system configuration then also supports SIL2 (EN62061) and PLd (EN13849-1).

The range includes dedicated two and three-axis amplifiers that provide cost, space and energy savings compared to using a set of single-axis amplifiers. These amplifiers also offer significant reductions in wiring and commissioning times.  The MR-J4 range of motors use 30 per cent less metal (including rare earth magnets) than the previous generation whilst still increasing its performance.

Contact us for more information on Mitsubishi MR-J4 servos