Dynamic analysis and simulation of electromagnetic contactors with AC solenoids

This paper presents a dynamic simulator for analyzing various behaviors of electromagnetic contactors with AC solenoids. The simulator enables short-time analysis of dynamic motions of contactors compared with conventional simulation methods such as finite element method (FEM). To realize fast calculation of contactor models, whole contactor system including electromagnetic circuit, and mechanism (motions and collisions) are described and modeled by differential equations. The differential equations are solved simultaneously by the Runge-Kutta method. The short-time analysis by the dynamic simulator allows contactor designers to test various changes of parameters of a contactor such as dimensions of solenoid, power voltage and the phase, mass and inertia of mechanical parts, environment temperature, etc. In the paper dynamic modeling of contactors and the simulation algorithm using the mathematical models are described in detail followed by the comparison with experimental results for verifying the utility of the dynamic simulator.