Displacement modeling of a digital actuators array for 2D conveyance application

This paper describes a displacement modeling of a digital actuators array for conveyance application. The actuators array is composed of 25 elementary actuators arranged in a 5 × 5 matrix configuration. A thin plate placed on the top side of the array is moved along two orthogonal directions. The model of the mobile permanent magnet and plate displacements is presented by taking into account the contribution of each elementary actuator. Using this model, the influence of several control parameters are presented, such as the driving current value, the number of controlled actuators. A comparison between simulated and experimental results is also presented and a good correlation between the results is observed.