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If you read our article Why Do Step Motors Get Hot? you may have wondered "What does this mean to me?” Step motor losses are important because the energy lost in the motor results in heat. Any motor has a thermal constant that can be used to compute how hot the motor will get for a given level of energy dissipation. Once the windings exceed 130°C, the insulation on the motor windings will melt and it’s game over.

Step motor motion is conceptually simple: Just rotate the stator field and the rotor will follow, so long as you don’t expect it to violate the laws of physics.  An easy but unpleasant way to violate said laws is to ask for more acceleration than the motor can achieve.  So how does one perform step motor trajectory calculations? As we learned in the post Dynamic Torque & Step Motor Sizing, maximum acceleration is determined by torque divided by inertia.

In our post Step Motor Heating we looked at step motor losses over a wide range of speeds and power supply voltages. Now, we deepen our examination. Step motors waste power in two ways: copper losses that result from the electrical resistance of the stator coils and iron losses from magnetic hysteresis and eddy currents. In both cases, this lost power results in the motor heating.

In our post What Do NEMA Sizes Mean?, we examined the NEMA frame sizes in which step motors are made. Larger frame sizes produce more torque. But this is not a one dimensional process: within a given frame size, the motor length can vary and that also affects torque. Because step motors require expensive tooling in order to be produced economically, a fixed rotor length is chosen, as is the stator that surrounds it.