ME-EM Graduate Seminar: ‘Mathematical Mode of a Reluctance Accelerator (Coilgun

oct22The ME-EM Graduate Seminar speaker on Thursday, October 22 at 4:00 in 103 EERC will be Dr. Gustavo Gutierrez from University of Puerto Rico – Mayaguez.

The title of his presentation will be ‘Mathematical Mode of a Reluctance Accelerator (Coilgun)’.

Linear reluctance motors (or linear oscillating motors) consist of an iron bar, moving inside a coil. During the trajectory of the iron bar an incremental force appears opposing the movement of the bar. For that reason it is important to control the system and taking advantage of that behavior. Reluctance motors can have high power density at low cost, making them ideal for many applications, in particular a magnetic pumping is proposed as part of a flat heat pipe device for heat transfer applications.

This work presents a mathematical model and its numerical considerations to simulate a reluctance accelerator (coilgun) taking into account an RLC circuit coupled to an electromechanical system. A coilgun is proposed as a magnetic pumping device of a flat heat pipe panel. The piston motion (armature) is governed by the Newton’s Second Law. The driving force on the piston is a magnetic force, called the Kelvin Force (KF). In order to compute the KF it is necessary to solve the Maxwell-Ampere’s equation. We are interested in the dynamic of the piston as part of a heat transfer application.

The complete problem shows a Multi-Physics character. This presentation will focus on the mathematical modeling, numerical implementation and important considerations for the design of a coilgun.

Dr. Gustavo Gutierrez, obtained his Bachelor degree in Civil Engineering from National University of Cordoba, Argentina in 1991, his M.S. and Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1998 and 2002 respectively. Currently Dr. Gutierrez is a Professor at the University of Puerto Rico – Mayaguez (UPRM). He held a Chair position from 2009 to 2012 of the Mechanical Engineering Department at UPRM. He received grants from DOD, NSF and NASA. He was an Invited panelist for NSF-CTS program, chair and cochair in technical sessions of National and International conferences and reviewer of the Journal of Heat Transfer and Journal of Fluid Mechanics. His areas of expertise include Computation Fluid Dynamics and Heat Transfer, Numerical Electromagnetisms and High Performance Computing.