Analysis method for giant magnetostrictive material based actuator using FEM

Giant Magnetostrictive Materials (GMM) came to attract attention because of great magnetostriction under moderate prestress condition, strong force, high response and so on. Recently, the design process of devices using this kind of smart material relies on computational tools increasingly. High accuracy analysis aids us in optimizing the performance of devices in the design stage. Then various kinds of analysis methods have been studied, however, it seems that any effective analysis method has not developed yet. One of the crucial reasons is that the nonlinearity of GMM is not considered in conventional method. In this paper, the magneto-mechanical coupled analysis method for GMM actuator is proposed using 3D-FEM under various prestress conditions, in which the nonlinearity of GMM characteristics are considered. Moreover, the validity of the proposed analysis method is verified through the comparison with the experiment of a prototype. © 2010 The Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan.