Saw-tooth pole solenoid actuator for aerospace applications

Solenoid is an electromagnetically operated actuator. The classical solenoids employ armatures which are either flat or conical pole with various cone angles based on the force requirement. This paper describes a novel method of introducing surface features at an appropriate location in the solenoid geometry in order to reduce the reluctance in the working air gap and decrease the leakage flux which also means increasing the Magneto Motive Force (MMF) into working air gap is discussed in this paper. The idea is to do minimal changes to the solenoid in order to extend its usability to more than one application. Infolytica MagNet® tool is used for performance comparison of conventional and proposed solenoid keeping same applied MMF and simulation parameters for both classical and proposed geometries. This analysis considers worst case solenoid geometry and it also includes method of modeling the practical non-idealities that exists due to manufacturing and assembly process. This analysis also provides input for refinement of solenoid part dimensions and tolerance stack up.