Magnetic springs are a fatigue-free alternative to mechanical springs that could enable\ncompliant actuation concepts in highly dynamic industrial applications. The goals of this article are:\n(1) to develop and validate a methodology for the optimal design of a magnetic spring and (2) to\nbenchmark the magnetic springs at the component level against conventional solutions, namely,\nmechanical springs and highly dynamic servo motors. We present an extensive exploration of the\nmagnetic spring design space both with respect to topology and geometry sizing, using a 2D finite\nelement magnetostatics software combined with a multi-objective genetic algorithm, as a part of a\nMagOpt design environment. The resulting Pareto-optima are used for benchmarking rotational\nmagnetic springs back-to-back with classical industrial solutions. The design methodology has been\nextensively validated using a combination of one physical prototype and multiple virtual designs.\nThe findings show that magnetic springs possess an energy density 50% higher than that of stateof-\nthe-art reported mechanical springs for the gigacycle regime and accordingly a torque density\nsignificantly higher than that of state-of-the-practice permanently magnetic synchronous motors.
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