Team 3 - Virginia Tech
The team spent the first semester of the project designing and conducting component-level testing. EMS was used the most in the first semester to support electromagnet configurations and visualizations for our faculty and advisors. We successfully displayed the representative SOLIDWORKS EMS model in real life through testing at a reduced scale with low power input. In the Spring semester, we finalized our design with an updated EMS model and developed a dynamic electromagnetic active damping system that responds to displacement data and increases/decreases force with current supply. The team greatly benefited from using the EMS software and would highly recommend its use to anyone working with electromagnets.
Team 3, a mechanical engineering senior design team at Virginia Tech, used EMWorks’s software, EMS, to simulate magnetic force and visualize the magnetic field in an active electromagnetic damping system for vibration testing. EMS helped us design our Lorentz force electromagnet to determine the strength of the system. We augmented our power input and placed our permanent magnets to optimize force output. EMS was easy to update through our many iterations of SOLIDWORKS models. We produced nearly a dozen different CAD configurations and tested several of them, leveraging theoretical EMS models and practical setups with 3D printed parts.