Three-Dimensional-Printed Magnetic Iron Material Modeling for High Speed Actuators

This article presents the modeling procedure of a particular 3-D-printed iron material appropriate for low-cost production of cores of actuators, a trend which is recently popular in the research community, with direct interest for the relevant industry. At first, the characteristics of cores manufactured by a commercially available magnetic iron polylactic acid (PLA) filament with low mass and cost are determined by considering a simple magnetic circuit of toroidal core geometry. Next, a permanent magnet actuator prototype is constructed by using equally 3-D printing procedure to manufacture also the machine’s casing and other individual parts by using a polyethylene terephthalate material. The motor’s behavior is evaluated through finite element analysis (FEA) in conjunction with equivalent surface impedance technique, enabling efficient consideration of eddy current losses in high frequencies, and the obtained results are validated by measurements.