Abstract
Thin steel plates are widely used as materials for automobiles, electric appliances, cans, and other products in current industries. Recently, the manufacturing of extremely thin steel plates has become possible, and with various industrial demands, the surface quality of steel plates continues to be enhanced. Research on non-contact transport technology is being carried out in order to apply magnetic levitation technology using electromagnets to the transport systems used in production lines for thin steel plates. When an ultrathin and flexible steel plate is to be levitated, levitation control becomes difficult due to the flexure of such a plate. Therefore, we previously proposed a bending levitation system in which an ultrathin steel plate is bent to an extent that does not induce plastic deformation. However, in an actual usage environment, there are electrical noise and mechanical disturbances, which deteriorate the levitation performance. Flexure of the ultra-thin steel plate in magnetic levitation can be obtained by numerical analysis. In this paper, in order to investigate the levitation stability of ultrathin steel plate, the bending magnetic levitation was simulated by numerical analysis. We use finite difference method for the simulation of curved magnetic levitation by numerical analysis. As a result, the bending magnetic levitation could be reproduced by the numerical analysis using the finite difference method.
