The hysteresis curve as a precursor to mechatronics Mechatronics is a unification of two technical elements (mechanics and electronics), but it is used nowadays in a wider sense as a noun and employed in company names, magazine titles and department names in universities. When I review the history and relevant matters around this term, I realise that my mechatronics is linked with magnetic hysteresis in various ways. It may deserve noting that the term hysteresis was invented by James Ewing around 1880 when he was a young professor at the University of Tokyo.
Hiroshi Matsuo, a nonfiction writer, investigated thoroughly the innovations by Japanese scientists/engineers and concluded that the starting period of the Tohoku Imperial University was astonishing; this university was established in Sendai, located 350 kilometres north of Tokyo with a population of 120,000. One of the major individuals there was Hidetsugu Yagi, known as an inventor of the Yagi-Uda antenna.
I remember listening to a story about Hidetsugu Yagi in a mechanical survey class given by a renowned professor who had known well this great electro-communication professor, who had a strong link with the UK, Germany and also the USA. So I shall survey briefly my path in reaching Professor Naruses class at Tohoku University.
I entered the Faculty of Engineering of Tohoku University as a freshman in 1958. It was nine years after the reform of Japans education system. The Imperial University had absorbed the Second Higher School, Sendai Higher Technical School, and others to be the new Tohoku University. The faculty had nine departments including the just-established Electronics Department, which was about to construct its building and facilities. We had to decide on one department for specialisation after spending a year and a half on the core engineering curriculum. The reason for choosing the newly instituted subject of electronic engineering as my area of specialism is that electronics was attractive among many students including myself, and my scores in general physics were good. Max Plancks famous lecture Kausalgestz und Willensfreiheit (Causality and Freedom of Will), which was a text book for reading practice of German, increased my curiosity about quantum physics, a relevant discipline for electronics. It should be noted that the core curriculums (science subjects, mathematics, languages and humanities) were taught by professors who had a good tradition of elite education at the Higher School for those who were about to study their specialities in an imperial university.
When I attended the classes of the electronics department, however, I found it difficult to fully understand the electro-physics as described by Max Planck, Albert Einstein and Irvin Schrdinger. The reasons for my difficulty may have been due to less teaching experiences of the new staff, but this could be a factor in my attempting to seek other areas of electronics rather than applied physics for my future career.
The key roles of Hidetsugu Yagi and others in pioneering electronics in Japan The course of general mechanical engineering was given by Professor Naruse, who was known to have played an important role in Toyota's early history in the development of passenger cars. In this course, he discussed the Western technical culture subjects that went beyond mechanical engineering and greatly affected many of us, each in his own way. In my case, I was inspired to come up with the notion of mechatronics. He often talked about his own life experiences. One of his interesting topics was about his experience in 1937 when he was studying at the Institute of Measurement Engineering at the Technische Hochschule in Dresden. One day Hidetsugu Yagi visited the German technical college to invite his former mentor, Professor Barkhausen, to Japan with the purpose of stimulating Japanese research on electro-communication. Yagi had shown Naruse around the laboratory of Barkhausen. He was much impressed to see Yagi being greeted with great respect by the lab researchers. To the younger researchers Yagi gave fatherly advice and encouragement, but with the more senior members he engaged in a technical discussion, often citing relevant Japanese reports with which he had been involved.
I wish to discuss the pioneering role of Hidetsugu Yagi in Japans early stages of electronics, but before that I must begin with Hantaro Nagaoka, who is known as the father of Japans modern science. His prominent contribution to science, including the saturnine model of atomic structure in 1904, can be traced back to the influence of Professor James Ewing, who had been appointed a professor at Tokyo Imperial University in 1878 at the age of 23, where he started the study of magnetism and seismology. As stated earlier, he coined this word in Tokyo. (After returning to the UK, Ewing was appointed professor at University College Dundee, then at Cambridge University and later as Principal of the University of Edinburgh, and became famous for directing the British codebreaking operation during World War I.) It is well known that Joseph John Thomson discovered the electron in 1897 and presented an atomic model in which electrons are distributed like the seeds in a watermelon. It was not until 1911 that Rutherford confirmed by experiment that Nagaokas model is closer to reality.
When Tohoku Imperial University was founded as the third imperial (i.e. national) university in 1907, the science department was established first and Nagaoka was commissioned by the Japanese government to select its faculty. He selected Kotaro Honda, Shirota Kusakabe, Keiichi Aichi and Jun Ishiwara, all of whom were his former students at Tokyo Imperial University. In 1913 Yagi, who was then teaching at the Sendai Higher Technical School, was instructed by the Government, upon the advice of Nagaoka and Honda, to go abroad for three years in preparation for starting the faculty of engineering at Tohoku University. Yagis wish was for the electrical department, which he was to head, to become a research centre in light-current engineering. Professor Barkhausen at the Technische Hochschule in Dresden was the worlds foremost expert on light-current engineering at the time, and so Yagi decided to study with him.
Links between Hidetsugu Yagi and the UK In the summer of 1914, when World War I broke out, Yagi was in Switzerland for a holiday. As he was unable to return to Dresden he decided to move to Professor John A. Flemings laboratory in London. Yagi was impressed by Flemings words: Wireless technology is such a fascinating subject that once you have taken it up, you cannot get out of it for your lifetime. Fleming was a very good mentor who helped him improve his English writing skills as a scientist. However, Yagi was not satisfied with just being a passive learner during his stay in the UK, and thought he would contribute to the Wests understanding of Japan, of which he was quite proud. Then Yagi displayed his extraordinary talent for finding the inborn talents of people he met and drawing them out. He put an advertisement in the personnel section of the newspaper offering Japanese language lessons for free, and one of those who responded was Arthur Waley. Waley, who later became one of the most accomplished Sinologists in the West, was still a young worker at the British Museum but he had already acquired a relatively good knowledge of classic Chinese. He also harboured the ambition to translate The Tale of Genji and needed someone to help him read the Japanese classics. Waley did indeed go on to produce a famous translation of The Tale of Genji, which was received with wide acclaim.
In the summer of 1915, London came increasingly under German Zeppelin bombing raids, and so Yagi went to the United States, where he studied for a short period with George W. Pierce, the inventor of the Pierce oscillator, at Harvard University, after which he returned to Sendai in 1916. He was appointed professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering at Tohoku University in Sendai in 1919. The other two departments were mechanical and chemical engineering. In 1920, Barkhausen and Kurz were successful in generating a shortwave of 40 cm wavelength. As there were no domestic wireless engineering companies they had to import wireless instruments from the Marconi Company or Telefunken. Yagis aspiration to make Tohoku University the Japanese Mecca of light-current engineering was started in such circumstances.
In 1922 Albert Einstein accepted an invitation to visit Japan and give a nationwide lecture tour on the theory of relativity. Jun Ishiwara, who acted as the main interpreter during Einsteins stay and had studied under Einstein in Switzerland, was said to be the only Japanese who really understood the theory of relativity. The year before Einsteins visit, he became embroiled in a love scandal with a well known poetess and resigned from Tohoku University, becoming a science writer/translator as well as a poet. In Sendai, Einstein met Kotaro Honda, Shirota Kusakabe, and Keiichi Aichi of the Physics Department, of which he is said to have written years later Sendai is one of the best cities for academic studies and its fearful competition partner is Tohoku University. Tragically, Aichi died from food poisoning a year later and then, the next year, Kusakabe died from erysipelas (an acute streptococcal infection of the skin). While the Physics Department had lost many of its creative minds, the Electrical Engineering Department headed by Yagi soon entered a period of fertile creativity.
In 1923 one of Yagis students found an interesting phenomenon when measuring the eigen frequencies of an experimental setup. Yagi was inspired by the more detailed data reported by his assistants and conceived of a directional antenna. In 1927 Yagi filed a UK patent for his directional antenna, which was eventually bought by the Marconi company. The royalties helped young Uda, who was then a lecturer, to carry out further research to develop the Yagi antenna to a practical level. In 1927 Kinjiro Okabe, another student of Yagi, invented a vacuum tube known as the split-anode magnetron that oscillated powerful shortwave electromagnetic waves. A powerful oscillation and a directional antenna are two indispensable pieces of equipment for designing a radar system, but the word or concept of radar had not yet been created. It was in 1935 that electromagnetic waves were successfully used for detecting an aircraft in Britain, and it was in 1941 that Radar was coined by two Americans, standing for Radio Detection and Ranging.
From light-current engineering to electronics When Yagi visited the United States in January 1928, he was invited to give speeches about his directional antenna and the split-anode magnetron at a convention of the American Institute of Radio Engineers. There Yagi heard the word 'electronics' for the first time. The word electronics had been coined as early as 1910 (perhaps in the UK) but had been used to describe the science of electron behaviour by vacuum tube physicists. When Yagi heard it in the late 1920s it was just beginning to be used in the U.S. to refer to the technology on non-radio industrial applications of the vacuum tube.
In spite of Yagis desire to establish Tohoku University as a Mecca of light-current engineering, it was not until 1935, after he had taken a second post at Osaka University while retaining his position at Tohoku University, that RIEC (Research Institute of Electrical Communication) was established, but their main subject was electro acoustic technology. In 1941 the Department of Electrical Communication was established at Tohoku University. When deciding on the departments name information engineering had been considered as another candidate but it was rejected for the reason that it could, in that wartime era, suggest espionage.
After Yagi left Tohoku University, his vision and spirit was carried on by Professor Yasushi Watanabe, who brought up capable researchers in the area known today as electronics. Watanabes activities were not limited to his university. I shall now present an anecdote, quoted from Japans Winning Margins, that describes what took place sometime about three years after the war had ended:
On 12 July 1948 came the announcement of the invention of the germanium transistor, which had actually been discovered the year before. Not long after, Professor Yasushi Watanabe was summoned to GHQ. An American officer whispered into the professors ear that a device called a transistor had been invented at the Bell Telephone Laboratory. He was told that it was something made of germanium for amplifying electric signals. As the Japanese scholar had once thought about a solid-state amplifier, he quickly understood the importance of the new invention. He saw that on the officials desk lay the documents announcing the details, and asked to be allowed to read them. This was not officially allowed; but instead the official left the room, leaving the documents on his desk. The lucky scholar quickly read through them and took notes on the important points. Before returning to Sendai to give the order to his laboratory staff to start research into the transistor, the professor conveyed the news to the Head of the Electro-Technical Laboratory belonging to MITI, which later played an important role in this area. ----
In the period following World War II, the UK placed much emphasis on the development of computer technology, while Japanese engineers and researchers focused on electronic devices for building compact radios and tape-recorders. Morita and Ibuka founded Sony and zealously pursued consumer electronics. Precision engineering was advanced, too, as seen in camera manufacturing. In the 1950s the word electronics (and its Japanese translation denshi kogaku) was adopted by the Japanese engineering community to replace light-current engineering.
How I came to devise the word Mechatronics As stated earlier, I chose the Department of Electronics. Yagis vision 40 years earlier of creating a major research centre for light-current engineering at Tohoku University was then realized as the three departments Electrical Communication, Electrical Engineering, and Electronic Engineering and with RIEC together formed a large and cohesive group of mutually supportive academic/research organisations. Japan had recently entered a period of rapid economic growth, later called the Japanese post-war economic miracle, and in 1959, Japan was elected to become the host of the 1964 Summer Olympics, which built up a tremendous excitement to make the Tokyo Olympics a great success. Great changes were about to take place around the world, and in science and engineering too, and the time seemed ripe for new ideas and paradigms. Just as Yagi had set his sights on light-current engineering some 40 years before, our class of freshly enrolled students sensed a new freedom to set our goals on expanding horizons. Solid-state transistors and optoelectronics represented new technologies based on quantum mechanics, and many of my classmates took up studies in these fields. Of course, there were others like myself who chose to pursue different paths. While attending a survey course on mechanical engineering by Professor Naruse, the great expert on mechanical gears, I came up with the idea of supplanting mechanical speed/torque converters with electro-mechanical means; perhaps this could be called the origins of mechatronics.
In the strong engineering tradition that was set up by Hidetsugu Yagi (when I was listening to Professor Naruse at his general machinery course), I may have sensed the possibility of unification of two disciplines that had developed largely independently of each other. The word mechatronics differs from electronics in their derivation: the meaning of electronics is straightforward, at least initially referring to the field dealing with electrons, whereas mechatronics is a portmanteau word derived from electronics and mechanics. For better or for worse, this word has become accepted in the industrial sector around the world.
The mysterious hysteresis motor
The subject of traditional electric machinery, taught by Professor Fukushima, was compulsory for electronic engineering students. This was a very difficult course, even for students like me who had been interested in electric motors as a hobby ever since my childhood days. Yet, when Professor Fukushima explained the principle of the hysteresis motor as a type of special machine, everything was clear to me. I was excited by all the knowledge that I had gained from mathematics, general physics and electromagnetism given in the speciality course; these were brought together within a few seconds so that I was able to understand the principle of this mysterious motor. Moreover this dissolved my frustration over the textbook on electromagnetic theory authored by a notable professor who used to be the rival of Yagi. He dealt with the power loss due to hysteresis but leaving out in-depth consideration; the fundamental principle of generation of mechanical torque was missing.
Hysteresis is known as the nonlinear phenomenon in which magnetic induction B and field intensity H vary in the way shown in Figure 1. In air and in most normal materials, B is only proportional to H and this implies that these materials are not susceptible to magnetism. Iron and its alloys display hysteresis, which can be characterised such that the time variation of magnetic induction delays the variation of field intensity. Here H is the cause and B is the result. The reason that when a type of time causality is arranged, spatial arrangement (such as in a ring magnetic material) mechanical torque is created, was very clear to me at that time.
Moreover, the motor starts and ramps using a hysteresis major loop but after the motor is pulled into the speed of the magnetic field formed by the windings, the motor torque and load torque is automatically balanced using the minor loops! Thus a rotation with constant speeds can be attained with a very simple scheme without sophisticated means. Multi speed operation in a 1-to-2 or 1-2-4 ratio was available by design of the windings.
Figure 1. Hysteresis and how to use its characteristics in a motor and for magnetic recording. The relation between magnetic flux density B and field intensity H displays non-linear behaviour. This can produce rotational torque in a construction as an electric motor, but can also be used for signal recording, which is information storage in current terminology. A ring made of an alloy having an appropriate coercive intensity not too high and not too low.
(a) Hysteresis is originally a nonlinear time relationship between B and H. Origin O denotes the non-magnetised state. When field intensity H is applied the magnetic state varies along with the initial curve. However, when H is reduced after the peak value, magnetic flux density B does not follow the initial curve but a major loop.
(b) In a hysteresis motor the magnetic states (B/H relations) trace a major loop and many minor loops. Before the rotor speed reaches the rotating field speed, the B/H operating point traces on the major loop altering magnetic polarisation, but after the speed has reached synchronism, the operating point travels on minor loops corresponding to the load torque at each part of the ring. Major loop (c) When hysteresis takes place in different time functions at different circumferential coordinate in a magnetic ring core, a torque can be developed around the shaft.
Magnetic tape
Hard disk
(d) Hysteresis can be used for information recording or storage. Coercive intensity Hc O
Minor loop
B H
Major loop Initial curve B H
Minor loops
The usefulness of hysteresis I learnt from the RIEC professors was in the area of electro acoustics: the recording and reproduction of sounds and voice. It was a surprise to me that the magnetic phenomenon known as hysteresis can be utilized for both electro communication and mechanical motion!
In my view, the hysteresis motor represented a bridging technology that eventually led to the combining of mechanics and electronics, i.e. mechatronics. (See Figure 2.)
When semiconductor technology advanced enough to produce integrated circuits and allowed the development of magneto-electronic sensors, hysteresis motors were supplanted by brushless DC motors, which were smaller and allowed for even finer control. The introduction of brushless motors with their electronic controls marked the true advent of the mechatronics age. Nowadays brushless motors employ high-energy magnets, allowing them to become quite compact. These magnets employing rare-earth materials were developed by another researcher at the Metal Material Laboratory of Tohoku University. Thus, mechatronics came into existence as a result of the integration of mechanics, electronics, and magnets (or magnetism).
As I mentioned earlier, the Scottish scientist James Ewing initiated the study of magnetic hysteresis while he was teaching in Japan. Charles Steinmetz had the original idea for an AC motor that can run using this magnetic hysteresis after he emigrated to America in 1889 via Switzerland from Germany. B.R.Teare developed, for his PhD study in 1937, a mathematical theory to explain the principle that magnetic hysteresis can produce torque to start an AC motor as an asynchronous motor using a hysteresis major loop and this eventually converts into a synchronous motor automatically using the minor loops! Thus a rotation with constant speeds can be attained with a very simple scheme without sophisticated means. He wrote a paper in the Proceedings of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in 1940. No Japanese scientist or engineer had the opportunity to read this paper before the outbreak of the Pacific War in December 1941.
AC biasing to hysteresis for noise reduction in magnetic recording One of the distinguished achievements at RIEC during the World War II time is the invention of the AC biasing method for magnetic recording by Professor Nagai. The magnetic recording itself is a technique using hysteresis, but this technique was vital for noise elimination in analogue recording. Professor Iwasaki, who would later invent perpendicular magnetic recording in the early 1970s, which is currently used in hard-disk digital storage, was studying in depth the behaviour of hysteresis. He was looking at this magnetic phenomenon from different angles. (See Figure 3.)
A practical AC biasing method of magnetic recording was also invented in America almost simultaneously, but the Figure 2. For the fulfilment of mechatronics magnetism was necessary as a go-between. Science and the application of magnetism were started before electronics.
Mechatronics Electronics Mechanics Magnetism Americans were successful in the design of good tape-recorders as a result of the hysteresis motor. After the War, Japanese engineers found out about the new motor used in American tape recorders, and decided to build their own hysteresis motor; the key was the magnetic material used for the rotor. A suitable alloy of iron, aluminium and nickel was eventually developed by a young scientist who had studied at the Science Department of Tohoku University. The technical issues were how to produce magnetic materials with relatively low coercive force with a narrow variation in material property. High coercive force does not permit smooth ramping, but too low coercive force makes the available torque too low. It is interesting to note that Ewings scientific heritage was handed down from Nagaoka to Kotaro Honda, who made the Science Department of Tohoku University the Japanese Mecca of metallurgy and permanent-magnet materials.
Figure 3 Principle of perpendicular magnetic recording.
Specialising in gaseous electronics before mechatronics My personal interest was in mechatronics, but no one was doing research in this area, so for my final-year project I chose to work in a laboratory of gaseous electronics, which was headed by Professor Hatta, who carried on the research subjects and style of Professor Watanabe, who had retired the year before I joined. I joined also because I was impressed by Professor Hattas textbook on gaseous discharge and interested in the possibility of nuclear fusion, which was expected to be an inexhaustible energy source after the petrol era. In nuclear fusion, plasma must be contained in a strong magnetic field and heated. My supervisor, Professor Hatta, planned to start with basic studies using a compact setup and a weak field. My first assignment was to design a set of Helmholtz coils to produce a uniform magnetic field that could contain the plasma within a glass tube. The coils were installed in a few months and supplied with a current of several hundred amps. My next assignment was to investigate theoretically a certain type of low-frequency wave which propagates in plasma and exhibits some strange characteristics. I was trained to read relevant papers in English and German and papers on theoretical analyses of waves and statistical approaches to gaseous problems. After my undergraduate studies, I went on to the Masters course to continue experimental studies of this wave at the laboratory, and also attended several classes offered by the Physics Department. Through the seminar discussions I came to realise that nuclear fusion technology would not be realised in my lifetime. At present still, some 40 years later, this technology has not yet reached the feasibility studies stage at the same time as we have the global warming issue.
My supervisor suggested that I observe the low-frequency wave, also using the Helmholtz coils. However, from the experiments conducted by my seniors (Master course students in electrical engineering) I found that plasma displays complicated behaviour even in a weak uniform magnetic field. So I decided instead to investigate the effect that recombination of electrons and ions at the glass wall would have on the wavelength, in the absence of any magnetic field. The laboratory was equipped with a glass-blowing shop with several craftsmen, one of whom fabricated several tapered tubes for my plasma containers. I constructed a measurement setup from glass fibre cables and mechanical components that I purchased from model-railroad shops. My supervisor instructed me to write a short paper of the experimental results, which received favourable responses from the US Navy laboratory and European specialists. I was aware that it was thanks to the well-equipped shops and support facilities established within the solid tradition of the Department of Electrical Engineering that I was able to carry out a successful experiment in a relatively short time. The mathematical technique and physics mentality I had learnt for three years in this laboratory worked usefully in my later career in mechatronics.
Creating a design theory of hysteresis motors After receiving a Masters degree, however, I decided to work in mechatronics. I chose the TEAC Corporation as my workplace because I sensed that this tape-recorder manufacturer would grow to become a publicly-quoted company in the very near future. This was in June 1964, four months before the first Shinkansen ran between Tokyo and Osaka and the Tokyo Olympic Games were held. When I consulted Professor Iwasaki on the prospects of TEAC before applying to work there, comparing it with Sony where he had worked earlier when it was just starting up, he made no comments regarding its future prospects as a company. But I was optimistic. On my first day at TEAC, I asked the President, Mr.Tani, to assign me a problem that had to be solved urgently. He said electric motor, in a hesitant manner since my background was mainly in electronic physics and not in motors. I asked what kind of motor? and hysteresis motor was his answer. Tani used to be one of the Japanese engineers who burned with enthusiasm about designing their own tape recorders as good as American ones, but he had not yet completed the design of a reliable motor to drive the tape. He needed a young man who had studied maths, physics and the essence of electric motors.
In early November that year, TEAC began manufacturing the rather expensive tape recorders that incorporated the motors I had designed. This tape recorder was targeted at young American soldiers who were stopping over in Tokyo before being transported to the battlefields of Vietnam. Figure 4 depicts the motor system in a high-class tape-recorder of that era.
My strategy for designing a two-speed motor (low speed for normal operation and high speed for increased frequency band) was separating the problem into two items; optimum design of the stators windings and improvement of the magnetic properties of the rotors key material. I thought that the former could be attained with the help of one technician but the latter needed the expertise of a metallurgy scientist from a steel manufacturer. The former problem was to invent a reasonable method to decide on the most suitable number of turns and wire diameters with minimum torque ripple. I made this a mathematical problem based on alternating current theory developed by Charles Steinmetz who investigated hysteresis in the area of electric motors. I was quickly successful in this, using the hysteresis material that was found to be most stable from my past experience. Two sets of windings are seen clearly in the example shown in Figure 5, but much smaller designs were required for a consumer tape-recorder. Needless to say, ease of manufacture was required since no automated winding machines were available at that time.
p f 120 (rpm) Figure 4. The classic design of a high-class or professional taperecorder employs one hysteresis motor and two eddy-current motors. If the rotor steel has a negligible coercive intensity like (a), the AC motor is an eddy-current motor, a type of induction motor that can operate at any speeds below the synchronous speed, which is the revolving speed of the magnetic field built by the stator windings and the electric currents flowing in them. See (d). Eddy current is the electric current induced in the rotor steel. The eddy current produces torque by interaction with the magnetic field built by the currents supplied from the mains. When the rotor steel has a low coercive intensity and the hysteresis major loop is close to an ellipse like (b) the AC motor is a hysteresis synchronous motor, which can revolve at the synchronous speed irrespective of load torque as explained in (d). Currently, how to reduce eddy-current and hysteresis in the stator core in a brushless DC motor for higher efficiency is an important challenge, but these fundamental electromagnetic phenomena were exploited in the mechatronics system in a classic tape-recorder.
B H
(a) For an eddy-current motor (b) For a hysteresis motor Torque Revolving speed Hysteresis motor
Eddy-current motor
(d) Torque vs. speed characteristics of two types of AC motors. (c) Two typical types of rotor shape. Speed is kept constant in this torque range.
Synchronous Speed
f
frequency p number of stators magnetic poles
A prototyped eddy current motor using mild steel with negligible coercive force. This is for giving tension to the magnetic tape.
Capstan Guide rollers Pinch roller Magnetic head Reel Eddy current motor using mild steel with negligible coercive force. This is for giving tension to the magnetic tape.
Belt Magnetic tape Torque Hysteresis synchronous motor to drive the flywheel via a belt to produce constant speeds. This mechanism was eventually supplanted by a direct drive using a compact brushless motor with sophisticated electronics.
Flywheel
The next step was the determination of the optimum magnetic properties. Note that a motor consists of a stator and a rotor as two main components. Figure 5 shows a type of stator, which is the stationary member composed with a lamination core and windings.
Figure 5. Windings of two-speed hysteresis motor designed for tape-recorders used in broadcasting centres. A set of four-pole windings and a set of eight pole windings are mounted. If the mains frequency is 50Hz, the rotational speed can be switched between 1500 rpm or 750 rpm. In the current technology, the speed is changed and controlled by electronics with simpler windings. See Figure 6 which shows the rotor construction to use with this stator.
The rotor is a rotating member placed in the magnetic field produced by the stator; its key material is the ring alloy in a hysteresis motor. Figure 6 shows some of the remaining ring alloys, which were called hysteresis rings. At the same time I carried out some experiments on eddy-current motors, a type of induction motor using steel sheet usually used for truck bodies, to provide suitable tension to the magnetic tape. I learnt that magnetic properties, including hysteresis of steel and its alloys, behave in mysterious ways when used in electric motors. Figure 4 includes a photo of a type of eddy-current motor. Two basic types of rotor (inner-rotor and outer-rotor types) are also indicated in Figure 4; the eddy current motor shown by the photo in this figure employed the outer rotor type. The stator shown in Figure 5 and the rotor in Figure 6 are for an inner rotor design.
Diameter 100mm Four-pole windings Eight-pole windings Figure 6. Hysteresis rings with different magnetic characteristics using cast steel alloys with aluminium and nickel were examined. Advancements of other types of magnets and microelectronics ushered in the advent of the brushless DC motor.
Theoretical studies and practical education at the Institute of Vocational Training
The next year, when I wanted to talk to someone about my recent job experiences and thoughts, I remembered the classes given by Professor Naruse. He had already retired from Tohoku University and became the first president of the newly established IVT (Institute of Vocational Training in Tokyo); I did not anticipate that I would join his staff several years later. After looking up his home telephone number, I called him, whereupon he invited me to come to his newly built Japanese-style house. At his house, he listened earnestly to my talk for several hours. One day several weeks later I received a telephone call from him at my workplace. He said he had sent his car with his secretary and wanted me to come to his office. I was then living in an apartment close to the company and was trying to spend as little money as possible in order to save, and as it was during the hot summer months I happened to be wearing only a shabby under-shirt. After a one hour ride, the car arrived at the Institute and I was shown to the Principals room. Professor Naruse personally showed me around the workshops where the students were being given training, and afterwards invited me to a cottage-like Japanese restaurant by a small lake. The reflected moon on the lake surface seen from the cottage was beautiful. Professor Naruse seemed to be in high spirits and at one point during the meal asked me, Kenjo-san why dont you come to my college? I thought that he was asking me to newly enrol as a student, and recall giving a half-baked reply. It was only a few days later that I learnt from a phone call from my former professor that he wanted me to join as a member of his teaching staff.
Acquaintance with a mathematician After I joined the IVT, Professor Naruse encouraged me to do research and obtain a Doctor of Engineering Degree, referring to the educational system he had seen in Germany. He sometimes talked about how Professor Barkhausen had praised Yagis talent as an experimentalist. I had known the Barkhausen effect related to magnetic hysteresis, but I felt little interest then in his work on vacuum tubes. Naruses ambition was to create a university, starting with a centre of vocational training, imbued with the kind of spirit that he and Yagi had felt at TH Dresden, and which they had previously introduced at Tohoku University.
I got acquainted with a number of people with unique personalities. I wish to mention two here, whose family names resemble each other. One is Nagamori, an electric-course student, and the other is Nagakura, a young staff member teaching mathematics.
Nagakura was not necessarily interested in vocational training or practical technical skills. When I heard him explain his work aimed at his doctorate on real-number functions, mathematical insights on electrical motors began bubbling up in my mind. But something else was needed for my insight to be much better. A few years later I found an old book entitled Theory of Electricity authored by G. Livens at the library of the electrical engineering department at my Alma Mater. A pair of equations in this monograph connected with the mathematical ideas and a new theory on electric motors emerged. Poyntings theorem on electro-magnetic energy flow, Livens theory on electro magnetic force and Teares theory on torque/losses in hysteresis motors were beautifully unified using Stieltjess integral which I learnt from Nagakura. Note that both Poynting and Livens were trained in mathematical physics and contributed to electro dynamic theory at Cambridge University in a tradition of mathematical physics descended from Maxwell.
I dont think that Maxwell took hysteresis into account in his equations before Ewings discovery of this magnetic phenomenon. However, the physical reason for torque generation due to hysteresis in a certain winding arrangement that I could understand quickly, qualitatively and intuitively can be explained quantitatively in a beautiful fashion using Maxwells differential equations and the relationship between the Riemann integral and the Stieltjes integral. Moreover, Maxwells equations are consistent with Einsteins special theory of relativity, which is thought of as a very fundamental theory for the physical rules in this universe.
We are usually taught about the hysteresis phenomenon referring to some specific ferromagnetic material, but I found at that time that a significant mechanism of creation and transfer of mechanical power using a magnetic field is concealed behind this phenomena. Moreover I realised that by means of my mathematical treatment this can be connected to the principle of what Steinmetz called a reaction motor. Magnetic fields can be controlled as we wish by controlling electric current in the windings by means of electronic devices of various sorts. This is the conceptual basis of my Mechatronics! I showed my notes to Professor Fukushima, whereupon he exclaimed, What an intriguing theory you have created, Kenjo! I will conduct your doctoral studies!
This theory is not necessarily needed in the practical application of mechatronics, but is helpful for understanding the basic principles of mechatronics regarding magnetics.
The good start of Nagamori a practical man When I was about to write a paper on optimum winding designs, the professor in charge of electrical technology discipline asked me to run a special class (lecture) for ten students who were about to start their final year programmes. He told me that there was one bright student who could have entered the University of Tokyo. We decided the subject to be small AC motors I built for tape recorder applications. I gave my first class. When I terminated my talks all the students but one quietly left the room. The student approached me and said What sort of motor is this, professor? pointing to another motor I had placed on a side table. This is a German-made motor called a brushless motor, I replied to the active student, No Japanese manufacturers are yet making this new design, but this will supplant these AC motors in the near future. This student was none other than Shigenobu Nagamori. When he was a final year student at a technical high-school in Kyoto, his teacher found the IVT in a publication by chance and advised him to apply for this unique university, because many students whose scores were poorer than his were going to universities. Nagamoris dream in going to IVT was in other areas than being a vocational instructor, which was the usual career for most IVT graduates.
Instead of choosing to become a politician, Nagamoris ambition steered him towards the profession of engineering and in 1967, joining TEAC as an engineer of precision motors, he set his goals to start his own high-tech company. Precision motors using magnetic materials with stable characteristics were being manufactured at various locations in Japan, while intensive research on magnetic recording media was being conducted in various academic and corporate research centres. Thus the basic infrastructure for the development of the mechatronics industry was in place, just waiting for a bold entrepreneur to appear.
The Mechatronics era was just around the corner One day Professor Naruse called me into his office and talked about his philosophical thoughts on mankinds happiness. It was before I wrote my dissertation, and I do not remember the details exactly. He talked about issues that went beyond science and technology. Afterwards he asked me what area of research I wanted to pursue. I felt awkward because I thought that I had already explained my ideas to him. But without hesitation, I replied mechatronics, the use of electronic circuits to drive/control multiple precision motors, without using mechanical gears! My idea was that, rather than controlling an entire mechanism by gears, the various parts could be driven more precisely by using multiple small motors each controlled by an electronic circuit. It was based on the common wisdom that creation is born by negating the present, and I expected that the great authority on mechanical gears would laugh or make some joke. Instead, he simply frowned and said nothing! The actual creation of a new paradigm is never explained away by such simple formulas as breaking the status quo, but nevertheless it was an important step in my conception of mechatronics.
As I have stated earlier I came up with this word when attending Professor Naruses class in 1960, but this respected mechanical engineering professor was unable to accept this concept in 1966. The times may have not been ripe for a word like mechatronics. Yet, the Mechatronics era was just around the corner.
This rapid advance in digital integrated circuits that began in the 1960s worked as the infrastructure foundation for mechatronics.
From hysteresis to brushless DC motors The simple but tricky principle of constant speed produced by a hysteresis motor was acceptable for recording and the reproduction of sounds, but higher quality and frequency independency was required. (The mains frequency is 50Hz in the Eastern area of Japan including the Tokyo area but 60Hz in the Western part of Japan.) Replacement of hysteresis motors by brushless DC motors was about to begin in record players. The design displayed in the Osaka Expo in 1970 by Panasonic was symbolic. This used a large brushless DC motor to drive the turntable without a belt but with sophisticated electronics. Panasonic continued refining this design concept and the example shown in Figure 7 is a pinnacle of Mechatronics design around 1980; a very simple arrangement of two-phase windings, rotor magnet and speed sensing printed circuit are integrated. The electronic circuit was still a mixture of discrete and integrated components.
TEAC designed a VTR system using a hysteresis motor for NHK to use for the Tokyo Olympics in 1964. However, it was in 1975 that light-weight VTR machines using a brushless DC motor as a consumer appliance began to be supplied by Sony, Nippon Victor, Toshiba, etc. Higher accuracy of speed was guaranteed by sophisticated electronics.
Figure 8 shows how a typical brushless DC motor in the late 1960s and the early 1970s resembled a hysteresis motor in stator and rotor constructions. An electronic circuit and position sensors are needed for this motor. Discrete transistors are used in this design, but current ones are operated with dedicated ICs. Another major difference in the brushless DC motor is seen in the coercive force of the magnet used for the rotor. Figure 9 explains the difference in the use of magnetic characteristics of a permanent-magnet material.
Figure 7. (a) Cutaway-view of a brushless DC motor made by Panasonic in the early 1980s for direct drive of the turntable of a record player, (b) pole arrangement of the rotor magnet and sensor printed circuit for speed detection, (c) deconstructed major elements.
Figure 8. An example of early brushless DC motor using an Alnico magnet for its rotor and Hall elements as the position sensor. Motor construction is basically the same as a hysteresis motor. See Figures 5 and 6.
Figure 9. In the case of brushless DC motors, the rotor material is magnetised by an external strong field intensity. When it is removed the operating point (magnetisation state o) travels along . This operating point varies in a range shown by red region when operated as a brushless motor. The polarisation never alters unlike the case of a hysteresis motor. N S N S N S N S In a hysteresis motor, magnetic poles are not necessarily fixed to the magnetic material; from start to synchronism the magnetic poles on the rotor slide on the rotor surface due to a low coercive force. When the rotor reaches the synchronous speed, which is the revolving speed of the stator magnetic poles determined by the windings and electric current supplied by the mains, the rotors poles are fixed to the materials. This automatic mechanism does not need a complicated power electronics system.
N S N N S S N S (a) Hysteresis motor. Rotors steel is magnetised by the revolving magnetic field built by the current flowing in the stator windings. When rotors speed is lower than the revolving field an angle appears between the stators magnetic poles and rotors polarisation. Because of a low coercive intensity the magnetic state on the rotor traces a hysteresis major loop, i.e. the magnetic state alters polarities.
(b) Brushless DC motor. Early brushless DC motor used a solid Alnico magnet, which is strongly magnetised. Due to a high coercive intensity the polarities are not affected by the stators field.
(c) SPM (Surface permanent magnet) type using segment magnets. A typical type for current brushless DC motor for small and medium sizes.
(d) IPM (Interior permanent magnet) type, another typical type of brushless DC motors for power applications.
N S N S N S S N When the stators number of revolving magnetic poles is eight, the rotor is magnetised in eight poles and the motor speed reduced by a factor 2. See Figure 5. B H
O
High coercive intensity Permeance line determined by number of magnetic poles, airgap length, magnet width, etc When magnetising current is turned off, magnetic state travels along this demagnetisation line. By an external magnetising current the materials B/H state is brought up to here, and travels towards when the current is turned off.
In a brushless DC motor, the rotors magnetic material must have a large coercive force, i.e. a permanent magnet material. Advent of the Mechatronics Age Epoch making 1972 I would say that the year 1972 was the dawn of Mechatronics. In that year an eight-bit microprocessor was developed by Intel Corporation, following their four-bit processors. This ushered in the fully-fledged electronics and mechatronics era. Masatoshi Shima, who also studied chemistry at Tohoku University, played an important role in the early stages of this drama, where he used his extraordinary memory of the fine IC chemical process masks to design the chip layout. But such individual feats of memory were soon supplanted by mainframe computers, which allowed the design of the 16-bit microprocessor and triggered the Personal Computer Era. Yaskawa Electric, which is mentioned at the beginning of this article, was a company that concentrated its resources in the electronic control of precision DC motors but was about to expand their control technology for AC induction motors. They coined the word Mecha-tronics and registered it as their trademark in 1972. (The hyphenated word struck me as unnatural, and official records of the time show that its application area was restricted to products falling under non-motor and non-electronic equipment - see Figure 10. It is important to note that they were unable to apply non-hyphenated Mechatronics as a trademark for the products which fall in the present-day category of mechatronics since the mechatronics Japanese word was popular in Japan as a word for machinery controlled by electronics. They may have come to find it useless to register Mecha-tronics as a trademark restricted to mechanical products only; therefore when the time came to apply for extension of the trademark registration ten years later, the company decided not to do so, but continued to use Mechatronics and its katakana as the company slogan, paving the way for its broad acceptance among engineering circles.
It was in 1973 that Nagamori started Nihon Densan (which later became NIDEC), but he started with conventional AC motors based on my design theory and technique. This was a cautious start but he thereby got good chances to convert to brushless DC motors effectively. In The Challenging Road, he declared his outlook to be the surging passion, boiling enthusiasm and tenacious persistence, and also stated: In 1973 when I built this company I changed my name to Mr. Dream Dreamer. We saw a fully-fledged mechatronics era when digital electronics ICs came to be used in large quantities and brushless DC motors came to be used in various applications.
Figure 10 Mecha-tronics and its katakana used to be Yaskawa Electric trademarks.
A Japanese journal called Mechatronics had been founded in 1976; the February 2009 issue marked its 400th issue. This had the effect of popularising the term mechatronics in Japan, just as the American magazine Electronics had made the word electronics popular. When the time came for Yaskawa to apply for extension of the trademark registration ten years later, the company decided not to do so, although it continued to use it as the company slogan.
The engine that propelled Mechatronics forward in the I T and business machine area Early large-sized magnetic hard disks or data storage in mainframe computers were driven by AC reluctance motors. This technology was adopted for eight-inch floppy disk drives from the late 1970s for one decade. The reluctance motor is a self-start synchronous motor though its construction is similar to a normal induction motor - a type of asynchronous motor. This sort of motor was inferior to the hysteresis motor in multi-speed characteristics, but suffices as a single speed operation fed from the mains. For downsizing personal computers, however, replacement of AC motors with brushless DC motors using permanent magnets was indispensable. It was in the 1980s that a drastic increase of brushless DC motors was seen in the area of hard disks for personal computers. Figure 11 is a brushless DC motor designed for an 8-inch HDD in 1981. Nagamori, ten years after his start as an entrepreneur, decided to enlarge his NIDEC into this area.
Progress in permanent magnets and integrated circuits over the past thirty years resulted in a big change in the design of precision motors; small-sized, light-weight design technologies broke the conventional theory developed for factory power motors. Ferrite magnets were used in the early era as seen in the design shown in Figure 7(c), but samarium cobalt began to be adopted for smaller motors for high-end products around 1985. In due course, more powerful but lower-cost neodymium magnet has supplanted samarium cobalt. By 1985 NIDEC became the worlds top supplier of HDD spindle motors. Position sensors using the Hall effect were supplanted by electronic artificial intelligence incorporated in a microprocessor or dedicated integrate circuit.
In the early 1990s fluid dynamic bearings were available for small HDD spindle motors but it was in 1997 that ball bearings began to be replaced with the new bearings for high accuracy revolutions. These were for high-density memory record and access. One such design is as seen in Figure 12, which employs an outer-rotor construction. Note that brushless HDD motors are manufactured in a clean room just as with semiconductor devices (see Figure 13).
Figure 11 A brushless DC motor manufactured by NIDEC in 1981for an 8-inch hard disk drive.
Mechatronics, as a new paradigm, was fulfilled by the establishment of a new industry, set up by enthusiastic young men educated at a technical institute - IVT - the only university which came under the Ministry of Labour rather than the Japanese Ministry of Education, that emphasised practical learning and manufacture based on short delivery times. A large per cent of business machines used in the world are today operating with precision motors supplied by NIDEC. Thus the worlds economic activities are underpinned by mechatronics technology.
The brushless DC motor, which began as a type of precision small electric motor, was developed even for power applications. Not only hybrid electric vehicles, but also some of the commuter trains are driven by brushless DC motors. A current small-sized, high-power and high efficiency design is shown in Figure 14, which was designed for the F5B radio control racing glider.
Figure 12. Brushless DC motors for HDD spindle drives; position sensing is implemented by sophisticated ICs sensing the current and voltage waveforms. Fluid dynamic bearings are used for high-density memory record and access.
My activity in Pedagogic work After my doctoral work, I produced a number of pedagogic materials for controlling electromagnetic fields using solid-state devices with the backgrounds stated above, and wrote several theoretical papers and a number of practical articles and books in Japanese based on my research results in my IVT years. Some 50 articles are included for the MECHATRONICS magazine under the title Mechatronics Controls using Microprocessors, which must have contributed to the progress in the use of electronic-based circuits or microprocessors for the control of precision motors. On the other hand, the materials I produced for the overseas courses at IVT were part of the sources for monographs I wrote to be published by Oxford University Press. I also contributed several papers for IEEE Transactions on Education in co-authorship with one of my students.
Yagis accomplishment in the Physics Area
I have tried to show above that mechatronics came about not only from the integration of mechanics and electronics, but also magnetics as well, and that it was a paradigm that came from synthesizing not just two but three disciplines. This may be a story of a branch of the tree whose trunk is rooted to Ewing, Nagaoka, Honda and Yagi. Another example of paradigm-building based on the triplet model is found in modern physics, specifically the basic theoretical advances in particle physics that can even explain why the Universe can exist! It is in this connection that Hidetsugu Yagi played a crucial role in bringing up, and bringing together, some of the more important Japanese scientific talents. This will be helpful for understanding the characteristics of Japanese sleeve engraved with herring-bone grooves on the inner surface magnet iron winding aluminium base thrust bush with spiral grooves on top surface rotor shaft armature core bearing housing lead wires s rotor (disk hub)
lubricant one of the three thin lubricant circulation grooves engraved at 120-degree intervals spiral grooves engraved on bottom end of the sleeve
technology in contrast with the progress of frontier physics, which have the same personal roots.
Figure 13. NIDECs Nagano Technical Centre and its clean room. Over 70% of the worlds brushless motors for hard disks are supplied by NIDEC.
Quantum physics brought by Dirac, Heisenberg and Nishina Two gifted students, Hideki Yukawa and Shinichiro Tomonaga, were studying physics in Kyoto University when quantum physics made big progress due to Heisenberg and Shrdinger around 1926 in Europe. Yoshio Nishina, one of the students of Nagaoka, who had studied in Cambridge, Gttingen, Copenhagen and Paris, had brought back to Japan in 1928 the latest knowledge on advanced physics. When Dirac and Heisenberg visited Kyoto University in 1929 accepting the request by Dr. Nishina, Yukawa sensed that there was an inferiority complex among the Japanese professors, even though they claimed to be their academic equals. He then decided to stay in Japan and not go abroad to pursue work in physics. Meanwhile, Tomonaga learnt the essence of quantum physics from them on this occasion. When in 1931, Nishina himself gave a special lecture at Kyoto University for one month he had noted these two when they were research assistants there. Tomonaga was subsequently hired by Nishina at his Riken laboratory in Tokyo, where he was soon productive writing papers. Yukawa was promoted to lecturer at Kyoto University but his keen interest in quantum physics was underappreciated by his superior, who specialised in the theory of relativity.
Figure 14 Brushless DC motor together with drive/control circuit built by NIDEC Motor Engineering Research Laboratory for F5B radio-controlled racing gliders.
The key role of Yagi at Osaka I mperial University The Government decided to establish the eighth Imperial University in Osaka in 1931 following the sixth in Seoul (1924) and the seventh in Taipei (1928). Nagaoka was appointed as its first president and requested Yagi to create and head its physics department while keeping his position at Tohoku Imperial University, hoping that this selection would lead to practical or useful physics. Ironically, this resulted in an epoch-making paradigm creation in pure physics. In March 1933 a young associate professor at Tohoku University notified Yagi of the existence of his brother Hideki Yukawa. He called on Yagi in April when an annual convention on mathematical physics was held at Tohoku University. Yagi explained to the young scholar his aspiration for mathematical physics. Yagi felt ambition hidden in Yukawas apparent shyness with his quiet voice, and decided to hire him at once. The day before his presentation at Tohoku University Yukawa had a memorable discussion with Tomonaga as they strolled the campus grounds. They stopped to scratch equations on the ground with a wooden branch concerning the (strong) nuclear force, which acts between a proton and a neutron to hold the nucleus together. Existence of the neutron had been verified by James Chadwick at the University of Liverpool only the previous year. Tomonaga was the only person with whom Yukawa could discuss the latest physical issues in Japan. According to the quantum theory, a field can be accommodated by one quantum (elementary particle) or more quanta. If an electron is a go-between quantum for the field that attracts a proton and proton, the distance which the force affects is too large. This was the result from Yukawas calculation. He explained to Tomonaga that a mysterious particle (quantum) must exist for a shorter distance field but he had not yet been successful in explaining its spin quantum number. This discussion was the start of elementary particle physics. History tells us that innovations or creations took place frequently at a certain town at a certain age. A creative atmosphere prevailed over the campus of Tohoku University when Yagi was a middle-aged professor and Sendai was known as the capital in a green forest.
Prediction of the meson by Yukawa One day in 1934 before departing for Europe to attend an international conference on physics in London and other purposes, Yagi called Yukawa to his office at Osaka University and complained about the fact that Yukawa had not yet published a single research paper for five years since graduating. He was actually working on the nuclear force, triggered by Fermis paper written in Italian, but he must have been seriously hurt. He struggled to create an innovative theory. Eventually he was inspired by an idea and completed his first paper when Yagi was returning from the six-month journey. It was in 1935 that this was published and was dispatched to libraries at universities and laboratories around the world, in which he hypothesized the existence of a new particle with a mass about 200 times that of the electron which would accurately account for the nuclear force. However, Japanese academic journals were not taken seriously at that time and the article went into storage before it came to the notice of any physicist. The next year, the American experimental physicists, Carl Anderson and Seth Neddermeyer, published their discovery of what seemed to be a new particle, and Yukawa, feeling confident that this provided experimental evidence for his prediction, sent a letter entitled A consistent theory of the nuclear force and the -disintegration to the editor of Nature, but the British publisher rejected it saying that there was no experimental evidence. Yukawas theory began to be noticed by the physics community in the West around 1937, and was eventually accepted as the standard theory of nuclear forces. The particle discovered by Anderson, now called the muon, did have a mass 207 times that of the electron, but was found not to be the particle predicted by Yukawa. Yukawa had predicted in 1935 what is today called a meson.
Outbreak of World War I I and Yagis misfortune In 1939 Yukawa was invited to attend the Solvay Conferences on Physics to discuss the theme of the meson. When Yukawa arrived in Naples on 2 August he knew that the leading physicists conference would not be held because the political tension was rising quickly in Europe. He met Tomonaga in Berlin, who had been collaborating with Heisenberg at Leipzig University since 1937. The boat that carried Yukawa from Japan was chartered for the Japanese to evacuate from Hamburg. When the boat arrived in the port of Bergen in Norway, Hitlers troops invaded Poland - the outbreak of World War II. Yukawa landed at New York but Tomonaga went to Panama to cross the Canal avoiding the USA. Yukawa visited the Institute for Advanced Study to meet Albert Einstein when he had just signed a letter to be sent to President Roosevelt to urge the atomic bomb project. Who could then have anticipated that six years later, as a result of the Manhattan Project, the first atomic bomb would be dropped on the town of Hiroshima guided by a small antenna Yagi had invented?
Yagi was very disappointed when he heard the news of the attack on Pearl Harbour, which signified the outbreak of the Pacific War. Early in the War, when the Japanese Army occupied Singapore in 1942, they found the Yagi antenna used at the British bases for their radar technology to detect enemy planes. Although Yagi had filed a Japanese patent for his invention 16 years earlier, it had been virtually ignored in Japan, and the fact that the enemy was using technology developed by a Japanese scientist shook the Japanese military. This resulted in Yagi gaining a measure of respect from the Japanese military.
Here it should be noted that when General Yuji Ito, who also studied at Barkhausens institute by Yagis recommendation, visited Germany in the Spring of 1941 to investigate German radar technology, ironically the German warship Bismarck was traced by radar and sunk by British warships (27 May 1941). Ito found an article in his hotel, which Lord Beaverbrook, then Minister of Supply in Winston Churchills Cabinet, wrote in the June 1941 issue of Nature about the UK radar system and sent it together with the report to the Navy Technical Laboratory. His report was not taken seriously.
Towards the end of the war, Yagi was appointed the Director of the Technology Agency; one programme which he headed in this capacity involved a direct attack on mainland United States using balloon bombs launched from a beach on Japans east coast. Out of 9300 balloons launched, it is thought that about one-tenth reached the U.S. Although ineffectual as a weapon, these attacks did arouse concerns among the American defence authorities, who censored any news of the bombs until six deaths occurred in Oregon.
Meeting of leading engineers of the two nations Yagis frustration with the military government increased and he explicitly opposed the kamikaze attacks with the sacrifice of young pilots. After a six-month stay as the Director of the Technology Agency he resigned from the post on 22 May 1945. Three days later Yagis house in Tokyo was burnt down by Allied bombing. After a few moves, a former student named Yamamoto offered him a mud storehouse to live in that had survived the incendiary bombs. When Yagi returned to the Higher Technical School from abroad in 1916, Yamamoto was motivated strongly by his words: If you are about to start a new business it must be in wireless technology. After graduation Yamamoto started his own company to produce generators for the power supply of wireless equipment. During the War, his company expanded rapidly due to wartime demand to supply generators for radio equipment for fighter planes for the Japanese Imperial Army and Navy, coming to employ some 5000 workers, some of whom were students of a girls high school mobilised under wartime martial law.
Japan lost the war completely in the summer of 1945. During the confusion in Japans immediate post-war years, Yamamoto had to let go of the majority of the company employees, but soon reorganised and returned to manufacturing products for peacetime applications. For some time, his company produced small electric motors for agricultural equipment, but later shifted to DC motors and stepping motors for numerically controlled (NC) machine tools and computers.
About a month after Japans defeat, Yagi was visited by Dr. Karl T. Compton and other members of the US Scientific Intelligence Mission at his storehouse home. Compton was President of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and elder brother of Arthur Holly Compton, the discoverer of the Compton effect (1923), and had arrived in Japan with General MacArthur as a member of the Scientific Intelligence Mission, whose purpose was to investigate scientific and technological advances in Japan, especially regarding weaponry. The two men had become acquainted much earlier when Yagi had visited the USA. It is noteworthy that when a powerful magnetron was invented at Birmingham University in 1940, the British Government found it such an important technology that they decided to transfer this technology to the United States for a joint project to obtain a key technical advantage towards winning the war. The centre of development was MIT, which became the technical development centre for the war with Japan, hiring thousands of technicians and engineers. It is said that the Germans knew of the cavity magnetron, but they overlooked its importance as a short-wave generator while the Anglo-American cooperation was aimed at quantity production.
According to Hiroshi Matsuo, who has written a biography of Yagi, the exchange that took place between the two may have been something like what follows.
Yagi, who was then 59-years old, greeted Compton saying, I did not expect to see you in Japan. If not for this unfortunate war, I would not have had the opportunity to visit Japan. replied Compton and continued, I had imagined that you would be rich and living in a large house from royalties of the patent on the Yagi antenna. Yagi laughed and said, That patent expired before its usefulness was ever recognised in Japan. In fact, Yagi had filed an extension of the patent, which ironically had been rejected by a former student of his at the Japanese Patent Office.
From Yagi, Dr. Compton learnt of Japans delay in developing technology. The meeting of the two leading science/technology educators in their respective countries, in their contrasting situations, was symbolic of the differences between Japan and the Allied countries in their programmes for building wartime technologies. Early in the war, the British had channeled vast financial and human resources into building radar systems, and pressed the Americans as well to undertake a similar programme. The superior radar systems of the Allies were a decisive factor in determining the wars outcome, in Europe and in the Pacific. The Manhattan Project, which began with an urgent letter by Einstein and other leading physicists to President Roosevelt to develop the atomic bomb, also was an extraordinary national effort that brought together the best scientific and engineering minds in the country. In contrast, in Japan the Imperial Navy and Army rejected any government interference and constantly competed for political influence, jealously guarding their own weapons technology programmes using entirely different drawing methods and terminologies for design and manufacture.
Hero and war criminal In 1947, Yukawas meson was detected by a measurement by the British physicist Cecil Powell. As a result Yukawa won the 1949 Nobel Prize and Powell the next year. When Yukawa became a hero in a Japan which was occupied by the Allies, Yagi was still treated as a war criminal being prohibited from holding an official post because of his former position as the Director of the Technology Agency. Nobody said that Yagi had played an important role in Yukawas achievement and Yukawa himself wouldnt express his thanks to Yagi. He said nothing, either. After his honour was restored the prominent engineer became an upper house MP for three years as a right-wing socialist, but he was not very successful as a politician. Matsuo, after detailed investigations with interviews with more than one hundred people and documents, concluded that Yagis most important accomplishment was providing Yukawa with an environment to be the first Japanese Nobel Laureate. When seen from a different angle, this was the start of elementary particle physics. Yagi passed away in 1976.
Post World War II Progress of electronics and mechatronics The rapid technological progress that took place following Japans defeat occurred largely because Japanese policy-makers and industrialists were able to recognise and learn from these wartime failures. Thus, Japan was able to move to the forefront of solid-state electronics at a relatively early stage. As stated earlier Professor Yasushi Watanabe played a key role in this effort.
The government coordinated promotion of industry. Numerical control based on transistor and computer technology was one such chosen area and, in the mid-1950s, Yamamotos company Sanyo Denki began focusing its resources into developing servomotors for NC applications. Later, in the early 1970s, they developed stepping motors which were supplied to IBM for use in computer peripherals.
The seeds of Mechatronics in the UK opened their blossoms in J apan The earliest stepping motors were invented in 1919 and 1920 in Britain: the first by a civil engineer in Aberdeen, and the other by two men in Newcastle upon Tyne. These inventors most likely received no royalties since there were no solid-state devices to operate the devices in this era. A type of motor that combined the former invention with a strong permanent magnet was invented in 1952 in America; this came to be known as the Slo-syn type of stepping motor which was used in computer peripheral equipment. In 1957 an article titled The Power Stepping Motor A New Digital Actuator appeared in an American engineering journal, and this heralded the advent of the NC age. To produce a complicated machine shape, three stepping motors were driven by electronic gas tubes controlled by punched paper tape produced by a computer. This article drew the attention of MITI (the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry) officials and company executives in Japan, who saw clearly that the gas tubes would soon be supplanted by transistors. Very soon afterwards, the Electro-Technical Laboratory initiated an intense R&D programme to develop NC technology.
Fanuc, which would later emerge as the worlds top manufacturer of numerically controlled machinery, saw its beginnings as a division of Fujitsu and developed a powerful stepping motor based on the construction of the said 1920 invention in Britain.
Thus we can see two streams of mechatronics: numerical control and magnetic recording. The former started under Government guidance, but the latter took place under entirely private initiative as seen in the TEAC and NIDEC cases. Both technologies underpin a diversity of human activities today. For example, the word micromechatronics is used in the context of magnetic recording systems with no mechanical gears, as in Joint Conference on Micromechatronics for Information and Precision Equipment. This demonstrates that magnetic recording and mechatronics are closely linked together. The amount of information created in computers and stored in them and other home appliances is still expanding at an extraordinary speed. There are estimates that 1000 exabytes (10 18 bytes) of data will be created and replicated worldwide in 2010, and billions of hard disk drives are needed to provide the vast bulk of this online data storage. Alongside this data storage technology is seen a new discipline of Spintronics, exploiting quantum properties of electron spin for one bit of data, falling under the category of micromechatronics.
Physics for new eras for reasoning existence of the Universe
Picking up on our earlier thread on physics, researchers were making steady progress even as Japanese society was undergoing extreme wartime stresses. Tomonaga participated in a wartime weapons research programme, where he successfully determined the electromagnetic oscillation mechanism in the split-anode magnetron at the Naval Technical Research Department, to develop a technology to destroy American bomber planes using electromagnetic beams. (He was also improving the transmission efficiency of electromagnetic waves generated by a magnetron, inspired by Heisenbergs paper brought in a U-boat from Germany.The split-anode magnetron was invented by Kinjiro Okabe at Tohoku University in 1926 and is now used in microwave ovens all over the world. The Director of the Naval Technical Research Department was Yasushi Watanabe, who is mentioned earlier.
Tomonaga developed a quantum field theory based on Diracs many-time theory and taking into account Einsteins theory of relativity. In his paper The Radiation Theories of Tomonaga, Schwinger, and Feynman, (Physical Review 75, 486(1949)), Freeman Dyson states: All the papers of Professor Tomonaga and his associates which have yet been published were completed before the end of 1946. The isolation of these Japanese workers has undoubtedly constituted a serious loss to theoretical physics. It was in 1947 that Tomonaga presented his mathematical technique of renormalisation to resolve problems in quantum electrodynamics (QED) in which infinite quantities resulted. In 1965 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for this theory, along with Julian Schwinger and Richard Feynman. Regrettably Dysons work did not win him the Nobel Prize even though he played an important role in clarifying the relationships among the theories of the three physicists.
Yukawa and some other physicists founded the Japanese journal Progress of Theoretical Physics in 1946. This English-language journal came to be a treasure trove for seeking new subjects for research. The work of the three 2008 Nobel Laureates in Physics - Nambu, Kobayashi and Maskawa on the violation of CP symmetry follows in the footsteps of Yukawa and Tomonaga. Physicists know that besides matter there is antimatter. The Big Bang should have created equal amounts of both, but the universe of today appears to be dominated by matter. CP symmetry means that the laws of physics would be the same if right and left were switched (parity reversal) and particles were switched with anti-particles (charge) at the same time. The dominance of matter in our universe means that this CP symmetry has been violated. Nambus contribution in this area was very important. In the war time, Nambu participated in Japanese radar research as a young military general and got acquainted with Okabe. It was in the late 1950s at the University of Chicago that Professor Nambu got an idea about the spontaneous broken symmetry from the theory of superconduction. By 1964 it had come to be known that protons, neutrons and other subatomic particles are made up of still smaller particles called quarks. The quark was postulated independently by Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig, who postulated three flavours: up, down and strange. The name quark was taken from the phrase Three quarks for Muster Mark! in Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, according to Gell-Man, who states that the number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature. However, it was in 1973 that Kobayashi and Maskawa presented a more complete triplet theory in Progress of Theoretical Physics. They expanded Italian physicist Nicola Cabibbos two-generation model of quark mixing to a three generation model and indicated the possibility of the violation of CP symmetry. This was a prediction of six flavours grouped into three generations, as well. The charm quark was discovered in 1974 and the bottom quark in 1977. But it was in 1994 that the heaviest top quark was eventually discovered. To compete with SLAC, the linear accelerator installed in Stanford University, the Japanese Government renewed an existing accelerator to verify the Kobayashi-Maskawa theory successfully in 2001. This is a huge electrodynamics machine incorporating hundreds of finely-controlled electro magnets as heavy as a warship. This project is a symbolic example of indispensable competition and international cooperation for a new paradigm, in this case clarification of the existence of the Universe by the violation of CP symmetry. As seen in this case as well, the creation of new concepts or paradigms can arise from an in-depth consideration of triplets. A similarity to the three elementary colours (R, G, B) was employed also by Nambu successfully to explain the characteristics of the symmetry/asymmetry characteristics of the wave equations for the three generations.
The new challenge for mechatronics
The three Japanese 2008 Nobel Prize Winners in Physics proposed mathematical constructions over 30 years ago to explain how the Universe can exist at all. We are, however, today confronted with the question of whether our industrial civilisation can continue to exist into the future.
Poison of artefact I recall Professor Naruses melancholy, which he voiced in 1943 in a dialogue with Riichi Yokomitsu, which was arranged by a popular science magazine. Yokomitsu was a famous writer who was then writing a novel about two Japanese couples staying in Europe before the outbreak of World War II, based on the general theme of the tensions between West and East. In February 1936, the engineering professor and the novelist boarded the same boat from Yokohama to Marseille, the former on a fact-finding tour on the state of technology in Europe and the latter to cover the Berlin Olympics as a journalist for a newspaper. Although Yokomitsu admired the accomplishments of European culture and civilisation, he came to feel a fundamental estrangement to the West. After returning to Japan, he urged Japanese writers to confront and overcome science, by which he meant that writers must learn from the precise observational and analytical methods of science but must exceed scientists in accurately describing the human situation. During the war years, he became increasingly nationalist and, along with other literary figures, started the Literary Home Front Movement (bungei jugo undo) in support of Japans war efforts. Unlike Yokomitsu, Naruse was a technologist who had deep faith in the material progress that technology promised. He stayed in Europe for two years and was greatly impressed by the scientific and technological achievements he encountered wherever he visited. This put him in a rather depressed mood, thinking that Japan would never be able to catch up, but triggered his soul-searching for how Japan could equal and rival the material civilisation achieved by the West. Eventually he came to believe that Japan had to develop its own indigenous form of technology, which was to be based on traditional craftsmanship based on the long transmission of lineages in Japan, the death-defying physical courage exemplified by the Japanese samurai (or male), the virtue manifested by Japanese women, and finally by the national spiritual culture, the national essence or kokutai, the dogma which asserted the divine lineage of the Japanese emperor and superior spirituality of the Japanese nation-race, and dominated during the years of Japans militarist expansionist policies. In spite of his faith in technology, Naruse viewed it as a necessary evil, a strong drug whose poison must be neutralised through the spiritual cultivation of those practising technology, such that the ancient sword craftsman had undertaken. In the magazine interview mentioned above, Naruse had commented that scientists and technologists must undergo spiritual purification to neutralise the poison of science and technology.
After Japan's defeat, Naruse no longer openly expressed his nationalist-spiritualist sentiments, but several decades later, when he was the Principal of the Institute of Vocational Training, after talking about the bright future resulting from industrial products, he would sometimes voice his concerns that there was no effective means to neutralise this poison, although none of us really took it seriously. In retrospect, it is clear that Naruse was not thinking specifically of environmental issues, but rather had a more general concern that the material culture of technology could destroy civilisation and human culture if spiritual development did not take place at the same time. While Naruse was unable to arrive at a specific remedy in regard to this question, much later, in the early 1990s Professor H. Yoshikawa at the University of Tokyo argued that present day evils, such as the worlds population explosion and global environmental destruction, were the result of traditional engineering disciplines each pursuing local, isolated solutions under the assumption of an unlimited field and resources. He felt that to address such global problems, it was necessary to establish a field to study the overall interactions resulting from the creation of artefacts in a limited field, calling it artefact engineering.
Technology to save Earth rather than the science for existence of the universe Technology can be blamed for producing weapons of mass destruction, which certainly constitute a major threat to our continued survival as a species, but we have come to realise that even technology used for peaceful aims can lead to irreversible degradation of the earths environment. During the past century, human beings have become accustomed to expending increasing amounts of energy, extracting ever more resources and producing a multitude of goods. Every day, people drive tens of millions of automobiles around the world, and the amount of CO2 emitted from their internal combustion engines has become unacceptable from the standpoint of global warming. To curb global warming to a truly acceptable level, we will need to evolve sustainable transportation modalities. The hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) embodies the latest advances in mechatronics but still represents only a temporary solution. In a future scenario where automobiles still play a major transport role, high-power electric motors will increasingly replace energy-consuming reciprocating engines, and perhaps the regional movements of tens of millions of cars will come to be supervised by thousands of cloud computers assisted by magnetic storage technology.
For such a future scenario to become a reality, however, mechatronics engineers must pull together, boldly confront the challenges we face, and take responsibility for our future. The development of an integrated mechatronics may require an entirely new paradigm, but we must have a clear vision that can guide us towards the right track in the technology road ahead. Even more passion and wisdom will be required than is exerted for clarification of the existence of the universe aimed at a Nobel Prize.
Mechatronics has been a long and exciting journey. Who will now forge a new coin and move the technology further forward?
Professor Takashi Kenjo, D.Eng, Director Emeritus, Nidec Motor Engineering Research Laboratory
The authors gratefully acknowledge the valuable help of Ryu Takeguchi, Kimihiko Hjota, and Gen Kimura. Their special thanks are extended to historian Hiroshi Matsuo, who gave them encouraging comments and permission to cite his masterpiece A man who brought up an electronic nation Hidetsugu Yagi and other innovators.
References (major IEEE papers by Professor Takashi Kenjo) 1. A unique desk-top electrical machinery lab for the mechatronics age, IEEE, 1997. 2. In-depth learning of cogging/detenting torque through experiments and simulations, IEEE, 1998. 3. Distant learning applied to a small-motor laboratory - Insight into the stepping motor, IEEE, 1999. 4. Developing educational software for mechatronics simulation, IEEE, 2001. 5. Remote laboratory for a brushless DC motor, IEEE, 2001. 6. Developing an educational simulation program for the PM stepping motor, IEEE, 2002. 7. DVTS-based remote laboratory across the Pacific over the gigabit network, IEEE, 2002. 8. A comparative study of turning and stationary groove journal bearings for HDD spindle motors under transient contact conditions, IEEE, 2007. 9. An Integrated system modeling and analysis of HDD spindle motors, IEEE, 2009.
OUP Technical books 1. Stepping motors and their microprocessor controls, First edition, 1984 2. Permanent-magnet and brushless DC servomotors, 1985 3. Electric motors and their controls An introduction, 1991 4. An introduction to ultrasonic motors, 1993 5. Stepping motors and their microprocessor controls, Second edition, 1994 6. Power electronics for the microprocessor age, 1994
Magna Physics technical book 1. Brushless motors, 2003
Illustrations and pictures Figure 1. Hysteresis and how to use its characteristics in a motor and for magnetic recording. The relation between magnetic flux density B and field intensity H displays non-linear behaviour. This can produce rotational torque in a construction as an electric motor, but can also be used for signal recording, which is information storage in current terminology. Figure 2. For the fulfilment of mechatronics magnetism was necessary as a go-between. Science and the application of magnetism were started before electronics. Figure 3. Principle of perpendicular magnetic recording. Figure 4. The classic design of a high-class or professional tape-recorder employs one hysteresis motor and two eddy-current motors. If the rotor steel has a negligible coercive intensity like (a), the AC motor is an eddy-current motor, a type of induction motor that can operate at any speeds below the synchronous speed, which is the revolving speed of the magnetic field built by the stator windings and the electric currents flowing in them. See (d). Eddy current is the electric current induced in the rotor steel. The eddy current produces torque by interaction with the magnetic field built by the currents supplied from the mains. When the rotor steel has a low coercive intensity the AC motor is a hysteresis synchronous motor, which can revolve at the synchronous speed irrespective of load torque as explained in (d). Currently, how to reduce eddy-current and hysteresis in the stator core in a brushless DC motor for higher efficiency is an important challenge, but these fundamental electromagnetic phenomena were exploited in the mechatronics system in a classic tape-recorder. Figure 5. Windings of two-speed hysteresis motor. A set of four-pole windings and a set of eight pole windings are mounted. If the mains frequency is 50Hz, the rotational speed can be switched between 1500 rpm or 750 rpm. In the current technology, the speed is changed and controlled by electronics with simpler windings. See Figure 6 which shows the rotor construction to use with this stator. Figure 6. Hysteresis rings with different magnetic characteristics using cast steel alloys with aluminium and nickel were examined. Advancements of other types of magnets and microelectronics ushered in the advent of the brushless DC motor. Figure 7. (a) Cutaway-view of a brushless DC motor made by Panasonic in the early 1980s for direct drive of the turntable of a record player, (b) pole arrangement of the rotor magnet and sensor printed circuit for speed detection, (c) deconstructed major elements. Figure 8. An example of early brushless DC motor using an Alnico magnet for its rotor and Hall elements as the position sensor. Motor construction is basically the same as a hysteresis motor. See Figures 5 and 6. Figure 9. In the case of brushless DC motor, the rotor material is magnetised by an external strong field intensity. When it is removed the operating point (magnetisation state o) travels along . This operating point varies in a range shown by red region when operated as a brushless motor. The polarisation never alters unlike the case of hysteresis motor. Figure 10. Mecha-tronics and its katakana used to be Yaskawa Electric trademarks. Figure 11. A brushless DC motor manufactured by NIDEC in 1981for an 8-inch hard disk drive. Figure 12. Brushless DC motors for HDD spindle drives; position sensing is implemented by sophisticated ICs sensing the current and voltage waveforms. Use of fluid dynamic bearings were for high-density memory record and access. Figure 13. NIDECs Nagano Technical Centre and its clean room. Over 70% of the worlds brushless motors for hard disks are supplied by NIDEC Figure 14. Brushless DC motor together with drive/control circuit built by NIDEC Motor Engineering Research Laboratory for F5B radio-controlled racing gliders.