Electromagnetic Actuators

The improvement of the dynamic behaviour was one of the main issues for the design of electric drives in the last decades especially for short stroke linear drives. A lot of interesting and well optimized actuators were described in papers and are available at the market. They use several physical driving principles (solenoid, voice coil, moving magnet, Thomson coil) each with its special properties. The engineer must select the proper principle for his design task and do the dimensioning. For the selection, it would be useful to have a support about the potential of the dynamic behaviour and the main influencing parameters. In this context, this contribution compares different electromagnetic drive principles at a concrete example application, shows the limits of the switching time and methods for similar investigations.