Electromagnetic System-Level Model of Novel Free Flight Microactuator

A new type of microactuator incorporates free flight phases to overcome the lack of ball bearings in microsystems. These designs employ electromagnets to manipulate the flying projectile. A precise and fast control of this system requires an accurate and computationally efficient compact model of the electromagnetic interaction. This work proposes a compact model that couples the system matrices of a finite element model with the Maxwell stress tensor to compute the force as an alternative to a commonly used lookup table. Both system-level models are evaluated in terms of accuracy and speed compared to a reference finite element model.