Abstract
This paper presents a Finite Element Analysis of a Permanent Magnet Linear Synchronous Motor. The aim is to obtain an accurate estimation of the detent force without oversize computation. First, some usual techniques dedicated to the calculation of the forces in electromagnetic devices, such as the Virtual Work Method and the Maxwell Stress Tensor, are described. Some keypoints of the meshing method using a commercial FEM software are presented and used in order to improve the thrust computations. After that, the topology and features of the studied motor are described to highlight specific problems of the modelling process. In the 2D FEM case, new meshing techniques are proposed, according to the force calculations. The FEM results obtained from the different methods are analysed and compared with the experimental ones. Second, using FEM results, a study of the independence of the cogging and the end-effect forces is presented. Particularly, an original approach is suggested in order to compute the cogging force only, using the same mesh for each motion step. Then, the PMLSM geometry is adapted to calculate the end-effect forces only.
