Intelligent stepper drive has ATEX and UL certification

Applied Motion Prod­ucts (AMP) has released a vari­ant of its STAC6 series microstep­ping dri­ve for high per­for­mance motion con­trol that has inter­na­tion­al cer­ti­fi­ca­tion for haz­ardous area use. Avail­able with full sup­port from Mclen­nan, the dri­ve is aimed at machine automa­tion appli­ca­tions in oil & gas, min­ing, print­ing and oth­er indus­tries where ATEX, IEC-Ex or UL cer­ti­fi­ca­tion is required. The dri­ve, des­ig­nat­ed STAC6-Q‑H, specif­i­cal­ly cov­ers ATEX and IEC-Ex cer­ti­fi­ca­tion for Class I, Zone 2 loca­tions and UL cer­ti­fi­ca­tion for Class 1, Div 2, Group C & D loca­tions. These haz­ardous areas are char­ac­terised such that flam­ma­ble gas­es, vapours or liq­uids are not like­ly to occur in nor­mal oper­a­tion but, if they do occur, will only per­sist for a short peri­od of time.
The pan­el mount­ed STAC6-Q‑H includes an inte­grat­ed intel­li­gent dri­ve with RS-232 and RS-485 com­mu­ni­ca­tion and offers motion con­trol con­fig­u­ra­tion options that include step & direc­tion, ana­logue volt­age, PC or PLC host con­trol, as well as stand­alone mul­ti­task­ing pro­gram­ma­ble con­trol. With its direct-on-line AC pow­er and pro­gram­ma­ble out­put cur­rent, from 0.5 to 6.0 A/phase, the dri­ve will suit medi­um-to-large sized haz­ardous area com­pat­i­ble step­per motors pro­duc­ing a high hold­ing torque and a wide speed range (con­tact Mclen­nan for suit­able ATEX and UL approved motors).
The choice of con­troller options includes AMP´s pow­er­ful Q‑Programming which may be used with its ST-Con­fig­u­ra­tor soft­ware to pro­vide graph­i­cal PC-based point and click pro­gram­ming for sim­ple machine sequenc­ing. Q‑Programming also pro­vides the means to write and edit mul­ti-tasked motion and machine con­trol code with maths func­tions and advanced fea­tures such as elec­tron­ic gear­box, prod­uct reg­is­tra­tion and on-the-fly motion functions.