Minimizing detent force of permanent magnet linear synchronous machines by designing mover using mesh-level stochastic shaping

Detent force is an inherent problem of permanent magnet linear synchronous machines (PMLSMs). In this paper, a mesh-level design methodology is proposed to minimize the detent force on PMLSMs. The novelty concerns introducing the inverse-based design to shape the mover ends on PMLSMs, allowing for automatically exploring the ideal mover ends configuration without any pre-given template. To this end, the ON/OFF method is used to express the topology of mover ends, metaheuristics algorithms are used to steer the topological evolution. To clarify the proposed method, two typical PMLSMs are adopted as numerical examples. The resulting mover ends produced by the genetic algorithm and immune algorithm are presented, and the convergence of the two algorithms is discussed. The comprehensive numerical results show that the proposed method is universal and practical as the detent force of the two typical PMLSMs can be suppressed to a low level.