Analytical Equipment and Instrumentation

Direct-drive with several Elliptec Motors
In this analytical device, we had to move a gas vial reproducibly within +/-750nm of a target position in all three spatial directions.  Any deviation would have been detrimental to the measurement. For this reason, four Elliptec Motors were used to move a slider containing the vial consistently slowly.  We developed a sequential control scheme where only one motor is activated at a time while the other three motors provide a support for the slider.

Highly dynamic positioning of a contacting pin
An extremely light slider was combined with a very small precision-bearing to achieve the required high precision and motor dynamics: specifically, a distance of 500µm had to be covered within less than 4ms and each target position had to be reached with 25µm accuracy.

Movement in vacuum
The Elliptec Motor enables low-cost high-precision motion for vacuum applications. It proved reliable motion under high vacuum conditions (~10-7 mBar) with temperatures of up to 95°C and even while depositing a thin film of material in a physical vapor deposition (PVD).

The motor only consists of a stainless steel spring (surface area 220 mm²), an aluminum resonator (surface area 335 mm²), and a piezo ceramic (surface area 70 mm²). The driven element can be made from various vacuum compatible materials like ceramics, stainless steel, glass, or plastics. Due to the materials of the motor and the small total surface area with no cavities, the motor shows a very small desorption rate. In addition, it can be baked up to 160°C. Even much higher temperatures can be used if the piezo ceramics is repolarised with a 54V DC voltage after the baking procedure. The standard PVC-coated cables can be replaced by cables suited for the specific application, such as teflon coated cables.

The versatility of the motor allows adapting it for special application purposes with direct drives or with gear trains or levers. Due to the low price for an Elliptec Motor, it is suited for applications where a lot of substrates have to be moved simultaneously. Therefore no complex mechanical systems are required.