high performance electromagnetic actuator and valvesczero-solutions.com › wp-content › uploads...

High Performance Electromagnetic Actuator and Valves

Rapid design & analysis using automated analysis tools

Czero has a passion for designing and developing innovative electromechanical actuator and valve designs that meet challenging performance requirements. We pride ourselves in providing the highest quality designs quickly and cost effectively.

Our award winning team has extensive experience converting our customers needs into robust prototypes that demonstrate proof of concept and are ready for series production. We serve multiple industries and work with companies ranging from startups to Tier 1 Suppliers. We also have done multiple projects for the Department of Energy.

In an effort to provide the best solutions in the shortest amount of time we have developed an automated process that allows us to iterate through hundreds of actuator designs a day to generate optimized designs in a fraction of the time that can be done without the process.

The result: Our customers get better designs, quicker results and save money

Electromechanical actuator and valve design

Czero, Inc - 320 E Vine Drive, Suite 325, Fort Collins, CO 80524 - (719) 331-9662 - www.czero-solutions.com

Czero streamlined process can iterate through hundreds of actuator designs a day to optimize metrics such as power consumption, energy consumption, maximum current, hold current, actuator speed, actuator acceleration, moving mass, total mass, etc.

Starting with a base design that has either been created from first principals or previous designs or the process:

- Creates solid models for all the actuator combinations

- Runs finite element analysis for each actuator design to create a force and inductance maps for the actuator at all combinations of gap and current

- Feeds these force maps and other parameters such as inductance into Simulink models to evaluate system performance.

- Simulink routines can be run to set the current level to achieve the desired performance allowing power and other metrics to be compared for equal performance

Rapid analysis and design process


• Import desired actuator into base part actuator in Solidworksvia design table

• Different actuators defined by several key parameters (eg. Coil height, pole diameter, wire gauge, etc)

• Generate sketch points from Solidworks for each configuration for import into Finite Element Analysis package

Step 1 – Generate Actuator Geometries


Import sketch points generated in Solidworks into Finite Element Analysis software.

Generate force and inductance maps as function of gap and current

Step 2 – Finite Element Analysis

Force Map (N)Actuator Gap (in)

0.001 0.010 0.020 0.030 0.040 0.060 0.080 0.100 0.120 0.160 0.200

Current 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

(A) 2 277 151 90 59 42 25 16 12 9 5 4

4 571 425 309 223 165 100 66 47 35 22 14

8 776 670 580 501 432 320 235 178 136 86 58

12 854 761 687 628 572 471 383 314 256 174 122

16 902 817 749 696 649 560 477 409 348 254 187

20 938 859 796 746 703 625 547 479 416 315 240

24 966 893 834 787 747 674 605 539 474 366 283

Inductance MapActuator Gap (in)

0.001 0.010 0.020 0.030 0.040 0.060 0.080 0.100 0.120 0.160 0.200

Current 0 0.096 0.073 0.059 0.050 0.044 0.036 0.031 0.028 0.025 0.022 0.020

(A) 2 0.095 0.075 0.061 0.052 0.045 0.037 0.032 0.028 0.025 0.022 0.020

4 0.069 0.063 0.056 0.050 0.044 0.037 0.032 0.028 0.026 0.022 0.020

8 0.041 0.040 0.039 0.037 0.036 0.033 0.030 0.027 0.025 0.022 0.020

12 0.029 0.029 0.028 0.028 0.028 0.026 0.025 0.024 0.023 0.021 0.019

16 0.023 0.023 0.023 0.022 0.022 0.022 0.021 0.020 0.020 0.019 0.017

20 0.019 0.019 0.019 0.019 0.019 0.018 0.018 0.017 0.017 0.016 0.016

24 0.016 0.016 0.016 0.016 0.016 0.016 0.016 0.015 0.015 0.014 0.014


Import maps of force and inductance and parameter generated in Finite Element Analysis code to Simulink

Optimization routine runs multiple simulations to find minimum current required to achieve target performance. The optimization routine can easily be reconfigured to optimize other objective functions.

Step 3 – System Simulation

0 20 40 60 80 100 120 1400

10

20

i

Curr

en

t (A

)

Stroke = 0.14

0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140-5

0

5

i

Tim

e (

ms)

0 20 40 60 80 100 120 1400

1

2

i

Ene

rgy (

J)

0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140-200

0

200

i

Cost F

unction


The automated routines we have set up allow us to quickly display the system tradeoffs of various designs.

Sharing this data with the client allows them to participate in the system engineering process.

Information from can be fed back into future runs to produce a final optimized result.

Step 4 – Analysis


This plot shows a run where we varied 4 actuator variables: pole diameter, wire gauge, coil aspect ratio and stroke.

The automated routine evaluates the designs and computes various metrics.

In this case the red squares are designs that could not achieve target time to open, yellow and green squares met target time to open, green squares are a subset that had the lowest energy use.

Step 4 – Analysis Example


Combining this powerful analysis tool with our engineering experience allows to arrive at an optimized solution.

Step 4 - Analysis Continued

Actuator speed as function of current and wire gauge


Question: how tight does our tolerance need to be between back iron and pole? We determined that we could increase that gap without appreciably reducing performance. This allowed us to open up the tolerances on the parts and reduce manufacturing costs for our client.

Sample past analysis – Back iron gap


Here we evaluated subtle changes in the armature shapes and looked at how they affected system performance. In this case we were able to make changes that improved performance at no cost.

Past sample results


Czero has years of experience with valve designs for liquids and gases. Our engineers have designed electromechanical valves with round trip switching times faster than 1 mSec and extremely low power consumption.

We use sophisticated Computational Fluid Dynamics to optimize flow and flow forces

Valve Design

Czero, Inc - 320 E Vine Dr, Suite 325, Fort Collins, CO 80524 - (719) 331-9662 - www.czero-solutions.com

Czero has developed a streamlined process that allows us to design and optimize electromechanical actuators and valves quickly and cost effectively.

The process can iterate through hundreds of actuator designs a day to optimize metrics such as power consumption, energy consumption, maximum current, hold current, actuator speed, actuator acceleration, moving mass, total mass, etc.

Combing this with years of actuator experience benefits our customers greatly:

- Optimized designs that use less power and have better performance

- Faster design cycle reduces development time

- Less engineering costs

- Robust designs

Summary – Czero design automation saves time and money


Guy Babbitt, Ph.D.

[email protected]

(970) 372-5775

(719) 331-9662 (c)

For more information contact


mailto:[email protected]

high performance electromagnetic actuator and valvesczero-solutions.com › wp-content › uploads...

Documents