The development of high-speed actuator and its modeling

Nowadays, an increasing demand for high-speed actuators appears in mechanical switches, motors, and automotive devices, which mainly benefits from massive forces that are produced in extremely short time to drive the mechanism to a very high speed. During the action of actuators, various physical processes including the hydrodynamics, mechanical motion, electromagnetic, and circuit may couple with each other, which altogether determine the dynamic characteristics of actuators. However, the key factors that limit the actuator performance still exist. On one hand, enormous impact will be created during the high-speed actuation, which results in the structure strength and buffer of actuator not satisfying the requirement of engineering application. On the other hand, the computational models to solve the dynamic mechanical characteristics of actuator are not perfect. This indicates that the assessment of actuator dynamic performance and its structure optimization become more and more difficult.

The objective and focus of this Special Issue are to present the achievement and innovation in the high-speed actuation technology. New principles of high-speed actuation technology are reviewed. Lots of improvements are proposed for conventional high-speed actuators, particularly the novel buffer schemes for actuators. At the same time, a number of numerical models to analyze the dynamic mechanical characteristics of actuator are discussed, in which the multi-physics equations that may reflect the flow field, transient electromagnetic field, electric circuit, and mechanical motion are coupled. These calculation methods can well reveal the interaction mechanism among various physical fields during the actuation, analyze the operational characteristics, and optimize the structure.