An Adaptive Meshless Computation Method for Design of Electromechanical Actuators

Abstract

The ever increasing cost of energy and advance in permanent magnet technology have the incentives to develop geometrically compact and energy-efficient electro-magnetic (EM) actuators for robotic and automation applications. Design automation of these actuators often involves solving a magnetic field problem. This paper presents an adaptive meshless method (MLM) that inherits many advantages of FEM but needs no explicit mesh structure for design of EM actuators. Specifically, this paper offers a technique to estimate the distribution of numerical errors and a scheme automatically inserts additional nodes to improve computational accuracy and efficiency. Five examples are given; the first three are numerical examples, where exact solutions are available, provide a means to validate the adaptive MLM and evaluate its effectiveness against MLM with uniform node distribution. The other examples, where the magnetic forces are computed from the Lorenz's law, illustrate the use of adaptive MLM for the pole design of a three-DOF EM actuator. We also verify the results by comparing the computed forces against published experimental results