Our team here at Design World has put together a follow up to last year’s Motion Control Handbook, this time with an emphasis on how to select the right components for your motion control system.

The goal is to make you aware of the most important considerations for sizing and selecting components for motion control applications. As you probably already know, entire textbooks have been written on just the physics and dynamics of the mechanical and electrical systems involved. So what you won’t find here is an exhaustive treatment of every possible detail of the selection process. What you will find, however, is a great starting point.

Like the old political catchphrase from the ‘90s about “it’s the economy, stupid,” it would be fair to say that the single most important first step in any selection process in the motion control world (or in any other engineering “world,” for that matter) is to know your application. Or, put another way, “What’s the application?”

For instance, what load are you moving? Is it a silicon wafer in a semiconductor manufacturing machine or a slab of glowing red steel fresh out of a steel mill? Are you moving a load a mile below the ocean’s surface, in a factory in Michigan, or on the surface of Mars? The answer to this most basic question will determine a lot about what product you select and the decisions you’ll have to make.

Beyond that, many companies have powerful sizing and selecting tools on their web sites to help their customers make the best choices. And if you need it, you can always talk to a sales engineer to help guide you through the process.

You can find the entire handbook broken out by component at http://www.motioncontroltips.com/category/selection-guide/.