Design and Fabrication of an Optimized Cylindrical Electromagnetic Pulsed Actuator

Abstract

In this paper, we present a strategy for designing a high-power linear electromagnetic pulsed actuator considering thermal, electromagnetic, and mechanical aspects. The optimization process was based on a first-principle calculation of the maximum current that the different parts of the coil and the materials conforming the device can resist without taking damage or altering their properties significantly due to thermal or mechanical stresses. Specifically, the minimum coil resistance (and the maximum safe current) for a given applied voltage was computed for a variety of wire diameters. Then, we employed a tailored numerical code to compute the coil geometry that produces the maximum pull/push force per ampere for typical commercial permanent magnet sizes. The combination of the optimized coil resistance and the optimized normalized force gives a maximized total force developed in the solenoid actuator. The designed coil was fabricated and characterized in order to analyze its performance. The results were compared with the calculations to perform an experimental validation of the numerical code obtaining and excellent agreement between computed and experimental results.