Rotating Ballnut - design ideas

[Jonathan]

Would it be possible, and much simpler to use a hollow shaft stepper/servo and use feed the screw through the motor and mount the motor directly to the ballnut with a flanged hub

Yes that method is used on some expensive commercial laser cutters. They use large servomotors with a hollow shaft containing the ball-nut running on a tensioned ballscrew. They get feedrates measured in meters per second.

There are few stepper or servos available with hollow shafts. The common ones have too little torque or the bore is insufficient. Anything above 16mm would be useful. It may be possible to dismantle an existing motor, machine a new shaft with the hole through the middle and use bigger, angular contact, bearings. For the size of my machine (1.7*0.74*0.4m) it's just not worth it as the 3nm steppers can already run it more than fast enough.

The advantage with using a standard motor, other than simplicity, is the timing belt allows you to change the drive ratio and reduces resonance. Currently mine is on 1:1 ratio, however it does go faster with a larger pulley on the motor. I elected to leave it at 1:1 however as 10m/min is plenty and I prefer to keep the resolution than get 15m/min+, but at least I have the option which wouldn't be the case with a hollow motor. In short I'm saying you have to be very careful with the selection of the motor, which makes it even more difficult to find a suitable one.