Fast component placement with optimized long-stroke passive gravity compensation integrated in a cylindrical/tubular PM actuator

Applications such as vibration isolation, gravity compensation, pick-and-place machines, etc., would benefit from (long-stroke) cylindrical/tubular permanent magnet (PM) actuators with integrated passive gravity compensation to minimize the power consumption. As an example, in component placing (pick-and-place) machines on printed circuit boards, passive devices allow the powerless counteraction of translator including nozzles or tooling bits. In these applications, an increasing demand is arising for high-speed actuation with high precision and bandwidth capability mainly due to the placement head being at the foundation of the motion chain, hence, a large mass of this device will result in high force/power requirements for the driving mechanism (i.e. an H-bridge with three linear permanent magnet motors placed in an H-configuration). This paper investigates a tubular actuator topology combined with passive gravity compensation. These two functionalities are separately introduced, where the combination is verified using comprehensive three dimensional (3D) finite element analyses.