Manufacturing Engineering

Aspen has two categories of automated winding equipment. One type of equipment (flexible equipment) is designed to accommodate flexibility having very little set up time involved in changing from one design configuration to another. This equipment can wind both conventional designs having an inner rotor constructions as well as outer rotor designs where the winding is on the inside of the motor.

The second category of winding equipment (hard tooled equipment) is focused on high volume manufacturing. These designs are hard tooled for a very specific winding and require considerable time to changeover from one design configuration to another. However, this type configuration winds units much quicker than the flexible winding equipment.

Where volume can justify the tooling we can design and our winding processes can accommodate Insulation Displacement Connectors Systems (IDC's). These allow for quick, low-labor content connections of the winding phases for volume production. These systems require considerably more upfront tooling for the plastics insulator component as well as the IDC system to incorporate this into production. As a result we typically implement these systems only on applications where the volume can justify the upfront cost of the implementation.

We have established processes and use materials that enable us to powder coat lamination stacks as part of our standard UL recognized insulation system. This process is very flexible and provides the underpinning for our motor insulation system. We have successfully used this system for system with voltage ratings over 400 volts.

We also have UL recognized plastics insulators as well for some applications which are used to reduce the labor content associated with the insulation process and/or provide additional mechanical features to the system (such as the IDC system).

In order to get products both prototyped and into production rapidly, we rely heavily on our in-house machining abilities. Within our facility we machine parts for our on in house tooling (assembly fixtures, molds, test fixtures), as well as prototype components and some production components.

In cases where our customer needs to get a design into production quickly (before the design is fully tooled), we can support limited volume production using fully machined components by utilizing our vast in house machining capability.

Within our facility we have saws, mills, lathes and precision machining centers with demonstrated tolerance capabilities of 0.0001 inch accuracy.

In many cases either due to the design and/or the processing required, we magnetize magnets in-house. This enables us to provide quick prototypes as well as process optimization for maximum unit performance.

We take pride in final product testing. We 100% test each and every product we manufacture prior to shipping them out. This is accomplish by utilizing high automated testers which are tailored to each specific product we products. With these testers we can measure many parameters in a very short amount of time. An example of specific items we test are:

• Motor BEMF
• Motor Resistance
• Feedback Alignment Accuracy
• Duty Cycle (of A and B channel for encoders or hall phases for each hall)
• No load speed
• No load current
• Control Input/Output
• Controller communications
• Various faults (overvoltage, undervoltage, current foldback, overtemp)
• External Sensor inputs

The data acquired by these testers is tied directly to the unit serial number and stored on our network. This data remains available if needed for review at a later time.

Aspen uses an established electronics encapsulation process for application where the electronics are placed into environments where contaminants may ingress onto the electronics. This encapsulation process seals the electronics into the encapsulant under vacuum to protect the electronics from such contaminants.

Much work went into developing this process to make it both highly reliable and easy to manufacture.

We have considerable Coordinate Measurement Machine experience to ensure accurate inspection of critical, hard-to-measure mechanical features. We use both polar and X-Y coordinate measuring systems and have demonstrated measurement accuracies of better than 0.00005 inch resolution in all three coordinates.

We use a RAM Optical machine for high speed inspection measurements. This machine takes measurements visually instead of mechanically (as does a CMM) which enables measurements of features that are otherwise impossible to accurately measure. These machines have demonstrated measurement of better than 0.0001 inch resolution in all three coordinates.