Solenoid Replacement Blog Posts
All blog posts below are about replacing solenoids with actuators using nitinol wire. Click on the image to see the whole post.
High Force Valve Actuator
High Force Valve Actuator
This prototype actuator was designed to provide 24 pounds of force and 3/8″ of stroke. There is a U-shaped Nitinol wire actuator on each side of the PCB (only one is currently installed), and they operate on a shared linkage. The SMA wire used here was 0.020″ diameter. The 3D printed ‘sled’ moves to the left when energized: compressing a spring that is pre-loaded to 12 pounds. If the load exceeds 12 pounds, the SMA wire can still contract by compressing the spring further. This protects the SMA wire from damage if the load exceeds the maximum design stress of the Nitinol wire.
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Solid State Pump or Valve Actuator / Valve Controller
Solid State Pump or Valve Actuator
An embedded coil, 12 layer spiral as shown, can be used to move a magnet which could be used to create a very small solid state pump (for air or liquid) or valve system arrays. Using standard printed circuit board (PCB) more than 1,000 of such devices can be printed on a single panel. These coils shown are 15 mm x 15 mm.
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Solid State Submersible Solenoid Actuator Operating Under Water
Solid State Submersible Actuator
Operating at 1/3 Hz to 3,300 Hz using an H-Bridge driver and an Arduino Uno operating at 12 Volts. This demonstrated the ability to operate in water and shows that the water cools the device enough to operate at high speed and high force.
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Pulley Valve Nitinol Actuator
Pulley Valve Nitinol Actuator
This is a high force linear actuator with a single SMA wire wound around pulleys to provide high force.
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Nitinol Pneumatic Cylinder Replacement
Nitinol Pneumatic Cylinder Replacement
This long stroke, high speed, prototype SMA actuator was designed for Sony to remove DVD’s that did not pass quality control from an assembly line. Mineral oil is used in the body of this actuator to enhance cooling of the Nitinol. This actuator features 8″ of 0.010″ diameter HT Flexinol. It operated at 28 Volts which is typical of industrial equipment. Our Nitinol Actuation Model showed that enhanced cooling would be required to meet the one second recovery time as required by the Sony spec.
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Haptic Force Feedback using a Wireless Solenoid
Haptic Force Feedback using a Wireless Solenoid
This video illustrates how a thin film force sensitive resistor can provide haptic feedback through the use of printed coils and a fixed magnet. 1.5 mm thin printed coils are energized when force in the resistor exceeds a given threshold. That causes the resistor and the acrylic to experience a hard click.
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Center Post Rail Gun Actuator
Center Post Rail Gun Actuator
Twelve layer printed coils are used to launch a small Neodymium Iron Borate magnet. We use short 10 ms pulses in the coil at 30 Volts.
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Nitinol Force Multiplier Pulley System in Mineral Oil
Nitinol Force Multiplier Pulley System in Mineral Oil
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Solenoid Coil Speaker Plate mounted on a guitar
Solenoid Coil Speaker Plate mounted on a guitar
This video shows five printed coils mounted on the tone bridge of a guitar. The audio is actually being played through the speaker coils and magnets are driving the acoustics of the guitar. Essentially this is a self-playing guitar.
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