Drives and Controls Magazine
Home
Menu

February News in Brief

01 February, 2010

♦  NSK has developed a new stainless steel for use in high-humidity, chemical or hygienic environments where corrosion can shorten the lives of rolling bearings. The ES1 steel is said to provide better corrosion resistance and rolling contact fatigue life than the AISI 440C steel usually employed in wet and aggressive environments. This helps to cut maintenance, downtime and replacement bearing costs.

♦  The German chip-maker iC-Haus has designed a high-resolution sine-to-digital converter chip with 13-bit real-time interpolation that supports the BiSS C protocol which enables bidirectional data exchange at the same time as the cyclic output of measurement data. The iC-NQC chip can be used for incremental or absolute encoders as well as for magnetic linear position measuring systems and optical linear scales. It offers binary resolutions from 8–8,192 angle steps, or decimal resolutions from 25–25,000 angle steps.

♦  The US motion control specialist Magnetek has received an initial production order worth almost $1.5m for a new liquid-cooled inverter for wind turbines. The inverters, which transform the DC output of the turbines’ generators into utility-grade AC power, are aimed at sealed-structure applications such as near-shore wind turbines, or those operating in corrosive environments or in high ambient temperatures.