Challenges on soft-landing control for minimal sized low-Voltage Pot core solenoid actuators

Description

Pot-core solenoids represent one of the most widely adopted topologies in linear actuators, owing to their simplicity, robustness, and ease of production scalability. In recent years, advanced control strategies have gained prominence to enhance actuator durability, minimize wear, and improve reliability. Effective control of such systems depends on the time constants of their subsystems. Traditionally, electromagnetic systems are designed with low electromagnetic time constants that are well separated from higher mechanical ones, enabling decoupled subsystems. This facilitates cascaded control architectures, such as motion control overlaid on faster underlying force, torque, or current control loops. In these configurations, soft-landing algorithms—whether sensor-based or selfsensing—perform reliably. However, emerging design imperatives emphasize volume minimization to reduce mass and production costs, alongside low-voltage operation to comply with stringent standards and regulations, particularly for explosion protection. These constraints converge the electromagnetic and mechanical time constants, necessitating novel control approaches. This study experimentally investigated these challenges using a simple pulsed soft-landing control scheme aimed at minimizing impact velocity to extend system longevity. The close coupling of subsystem dynamics resulted in poor control stability, with only a narrow temporal window for achieving the desired performance.

Period	14 Oct 2025
Event title	Smart Actuators Day 2025
Event type	Conference
Location	Linz, AustriaShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International