A multi-physics-based methodology for electro-magneto-mechanical co-simulation in dynamic applications: A case study

Multibody-based design methodologies are techniques that have seen an increasing use, both in industry and science, in the last few decades. Normally the analysis of large and complex mechanical systems tends to be decoupled to isolate the main macro phenomena and thus allow the models to be simulated by different techniques, tools, and algorithms. All these aspects highlight the difficulties of analysis of coupled heterogeneous systems. The strict interdependence between the different physical domains or different scales of analysis has clearly increased the difficulties in multibody prediction capabilities. An interesting new approach is represented by the multi-physics co-simulations technique where the global model of a coupled system is solved through the inter-exchange of effort and flow variables coming from events of different natures. The paper intends to propose a novel co-simulation architecture for the integration of the magnetic and analog electronic domains into the mechanic one through the implementation among the others of a Matlab-Python based bi-directional communication routine for the interexchange of effort and flow independent variables between the master model (multibody-based) and the equivalent circuit model developed through Spice® as well as the possibility to integrate the dynamic analysis of the 3D electro-magnetic field through the open package ESRF Radia®. To highlight the potentiality of the multi-domain architecture and to validate the results obtained from the co-simulation a comparison with the experimental results of a micro electro-magnetic actuated drive [1] are proposed.