New digitised resolver increases efficiency and reduces costs

Each device has selectable addressing, so the control room can easily track multiple units on a single cable, and display current data with certainty of its origin. This greatly reduces the number of cables needed to connect work stations to the control room.

The ERD unit includes an isolated 110-220V power supply and has a memory to keep track of the last location, eliminating ­­the concern of losing positional information in the event of a power outage or other disruption.

“We built the ERD to address specific issues our customers were facing. Some facilities have upwards of 250 work stations, with cabling covering over 500ft to the control room and installed cable at $1/ft or more. Add in signal conditioning and you’ve got a significant expense that still leaves you with operational concerns,” said Richard Halstead, President of Empire Magnetics. “Multiplexing multiple ERDs on a network is superior to traditional dedicated cabling in terms of cost reduction, but offers other advantages as well.”

The primary market for the ERD is large beamline facilities such as: Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Stanford Linear Accelerator, and the National Ignition Facility at LLNL, where beams of particles or high-energy photons are generated for research purposes.  For efficiency, automated equipment is needed to position samples and sensors in the beam. Because these are subatomic particles or very short wave photons, high-precision equipment is needed.

Frequently, equipment is also required to operate in vacuum, or subject to high-intensity radiation, or both. The ability of the control room to request and display the up/down counter, via Ethernet addresses facility control, but the delays in the communication are not acceptable for real-time closed loop. The ERD resolves this issue by producing real-time Quadrature pulses compatible with most encoder-based controls.