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Project Log 96: "Final" Project Log.6

A project log for DIY Mech or Exoskeleton suit.

Mechs are not viable, nor cheap, so I will try to design and build one alone anyway.

fulanodetailFulanoDetail 03/04/2025 at 20:330 Comments

Magnetohydrodynamic levitation for high-performance flexible pumps | PNAS    

This one is just a flexible linear electromagnetic motor… Silicone and polyurethane rubber and polyethylene maintain their flexibility up to 100ºC.

Source: High Efficiency LSM with High Flux Densityfor Transportation

10 kilonewtons = 1000 kg

For the life of me I can’t find a f*cking flexible voice coil

Soft Electromagnetic Artificial Muscles Using Liquid-Metal Coils and Bistable Housings

Soft Electromagnetic Artificial Muscles Using High‐Density Liquid‐Metal Solenoid Coils and Bistable Stretchable Magnetic Housings

Multifunctional Magnetic Muscles for Soft Robotics | Nature Communications 

Researchers develop soft electromagnetic actuators with medical potential

Soft shape-programmable surfaces by fast electromagnetic actuation of liquid metal networks | Nature Communications

Sources: Versatile Ultrasoft Electromagnetic Actuators with Integrated Strain-Sensing Cellulose Nanofibril Foams Multi-object optimal design of electromagnetic artificial muscle structure | Semantic Scholar

Sources: Self-vectoring electromagnetic soft robots with high operational dimensionality | Nature Communications Energy and Force Optimization of a Network of Novel Electromagnetic Soft Actuators

Design optimization of a solenoid-based electromagnetic soft actuator with permanent magnet core 

Design Optimization of a Novel Networked Electromagnetic Soft Actuators system Based on Branch and Bound Algorithm 

Soft Electromagnetic Sliding Actuators for Compliant Planar Motions Using Microfluidic Coil Arrays

Integrated Actuation and Sensing: Toward Intelligent Soft Robots | Cyborg and Bionic Systems     

(PDF) Reconfigurable Magnetic Slime Robot: Deformation, Adaptability, and Multifunction

Soft and Deformable Sensors Based on Liquid Metals

Steel Heart- Artificial Heart Prototype  

A unified understanding of magnetorheological elastomers for rapid and extreme stiffness tuning 

Magnetorheological elastomers — An underestimated class of soft actuator materials - Holger Böse, Thomas Gerlach, Johannes Ehrlich, 2021 

Sources: Using Voice Coils to Actuate Modular Soft Robots: Wormbot, an Example Linbots: Soft Modular Robots Utilizing Voice Coils 

(PDF) Electromagnetically driven elastic actuator

MagFlex: An Electromagnetic Soft Actuator for Safe Human-Robot Interaction | SpringerLink 

Programmable Shape-Shifting Soft Robotic Structure Using Liquid Metal Electromagnetic Actuators

magnetic hydrogel 

Source: Crosslinking Metal Nanoparticles into the Polymer Backbone of Hydrogels Enables Preparation of Soft, Magnetic Field-Driven Actuators with Muscle-Like Flexibility

Magnetic shape memory alloy actuator  

Magnetic shape-memory alloy - Wikipedia

Magnetic Fields #electromagnetism - YouTube Showing the direction of a magnetic field around a coil (maybe you could have an electric artificial muscle by having wires braided around a single electromagnet, just like in the video, but I simply cannot find any examples in real world to base myself upon) 

Innovative grasping system with versatility and automation | Request PDF 

Goddammit! This is so frustrating!

I can’t think of any reason on why a flexible soft voice-coil or solenoid actuator wouldn’t work, but I can’t find a single article that explores such an idea.

The examples I could find (listed above) are approximations of what I meant, maybe it can work, maybe it won’t.

3D modeling Actuators:

This is me from the future, in the cooling jacket section I explained how I could achieve a -70ºC cooling system using just air.

First, the objectives:

I will be working with electroadhesion to keep the build as simple as possible. So, besides the Motors, I need to decide how many pieces I will need to build in order to keep the whole mech customizable. Basically, what pieces I need to 3D model that will allow me to build everything like a lego.

Now that I’m talking about the Lego-like fittings, I do wonder: I want a mech with arms and legs with the same length?

Although the motors and bearings will fit into the cylinders that will be the limbs, the limbs can’t just have the same length and weight, can they?

The efficiency curve of solenoid actuators is very poor, however, if you switch the metal plunge to an electromagnetic plunge, it starts to work like a Voice coil.

Well, I’ve decided: Voice Coils/Solenoids it is.

Although I gave up on the brushless motor, the subjects I learned about while trying to find out how to make it work are still relevant for voice coil actuators.

They will weigh just as much and maybe output way less force, but they are simpler to wind/build and simpler to control.

In the previous topic, I suggested working with rigid linear voice coils, but just now I remembered that there are multiple types of voice coil actuators. Including rotary ones.

https://youtu.be/g_orrgADBk4

This one is called a “bistable rotary solenoid”, but a rotary voice coil looks more like this:

Rotary voice coil motor RVCM - 180

Akshually🤓 this isn’t a motor, but a solenoid/voice coil because a motor is meant to rotate multiple times per second, unlike this one.

In either case, both of these designs are way simpler approaches of making an electric actuator instead of the “Xangô-99” that was supposed to have 99 slots and 66 poles.

And I think that the rotary voice coils will be useful in a few places while the linear ones will be useful in others.

Torso, shoulders, knees, elbows and feet could have linear actuators in configurations similar to a stewart platform with 4 actuators and the rotary ones would be reserved for motions that wouldn’t be possible to do. Like the arm rotation after the shoulder, the rotation at the base of the wrist, the rotation at the base of the ankle and the rotation of the thighs.

There would need to be a lot of parallel linear voice coils because of the thickness of the inner core.

Or I could keep doing the same thing of the two mirrored stators facing each other, but instead of 99 slots, there are just 2 in each stator-rotor…

Or I could keep it at 3 slots for better precision and range of motion… 

But wasn't the 99 slot meant to give as much as possible? Are the 3 slots going to give as much torque and kv?

Or the number of slots won't affect it that much?

The TrainedGPT, Web-searchGPT and ChatGPT tend to always either assume that the idea is correct or that it won’t work. But a detail that I thought was interesting is that they agree that this motor would go up to 3000 rpm at 50 hertz at the cost of torque, so I think I would need to reduce the torque proportionally in order to reach the rpm I want.

I couldn’t find a solid answer from GPT, but it is said that reducing the frequency in order to increase torque at the cost of rpm also decreases efficiency.

Taking efficiency curves into consideration, I should have considered that from the beginning.

… But ChatGPT (and a few forums) kinda let it to be understood that also increasing the gauge (wire thickness) and number of turns would also increase efficiency while increasing the torque at a given frequency.

I both feel like this was a huge waste of time and a genuinely necessary process and evolution in order to reach this conclusion.

One detail I’m actually afraid of: the structural strength of the motor.

We are talking about a resin infused ferrite core that will support 30,000 newton meters of torque.

How I’m sure that it won’t catastrophically fail?

I asked ChatGPT, and it said the core should have at least 20 to 300 MPa of sher and/or tensile strength (from where it took that number, I’m not aware). Ferrite cores have only 50 MPa of tensile strength.

So, I thought on the following:

If you are using ferrite powder for the soft magnetic core or an improvised iron/nickel/silicon steel core (like using wires of said materials), you will need to make holes so the graphene/glass fiber composite can give support to the structure. Like a honeycomb, where the holes are the structural material and the rest is the resin infused ferrite.

However, I would increase its dimensions from 30cm x 23cm to 30x30cm for compensation.

If you don’t really care about the performance of the magnetic field, you can just replace the core with the composite you intend on using. It will be just like an aircore motor.

I’m still procrastinating, but for some reason, I feel like I’m missing something.

I keep looking through the project logs and saved links I have on my computer, but I always feel like I’m missing something, that I didn’t layed out the project just yet…

Well, anyway:

First I started using open source 3D models and aligned them, just to give a sense of scale. Left to right is a 3D model with roughly my height (185cm tall), the height of a mech that can fit in my room (265cm tall) and the height I was thinking of (380cm tall). At the end there is the electric motor’s mockup, one with 30x30cm, another with 24x30cm and finally with 15x30cm (the version where I cut the wiring in half).

In this one I just made the human sized model in a sitting position in order to visualize how they would fit in the 2.6 meter tall mech and the 3.8 meter tall one. Kinda campred.

In order to fit the pilot without any problem, you would need to make it 5 meters tall:

Out of curiosity, I tested how it would look if the mech was like that skeleton suit from the Avatar’s movie (the blue guys) or that mech from Appleseed.

It looks like sh1t.

I guess this one looks better and even more practical (the weird pose on the right is just showing that you could either keep the arms inside of the cockpit or the arms inside the mech’s limb).

In this one I made tubes that would be a mockup for the limbs, then I would add the motors afterwards just to see how much space they would occupy

Unfortunately, as you can see, on the 2.65 meter tall mech, the motors (either 30x30cm or 24x30cm) would be just too big.

I forgot to test the 15x30cm one:

I know that there are some motors overlapping, just pretend that they are behind each other, squeezing as much space as possible.

I will test it using voice coil actuators.

It is still a little bit cramped in there, but this looks way more viable than the motors.

Also, the dimensions of the voice coil actuators are 14cm of outer diameter, 10cm of inner diameter and 30cm of length. Weighing 6kg, but if you reduce the outer diameter to 12cm, it goes to 3kg. I`m also assuming that the moving rod will fill the interior of that space.

Now I will test the 3,8 meters tall mech:

From left to right: 30x30cm motors, 24x30cm motors, 15x30cm motors and voice coils.

Although the electric motors would be more efficient, they aren’t nearly as compact as the voice coils…

Out of curiosity, I added the electric motors to the 5 meter tall mech:

On the left it is the 15x30cm motors, on the right 30x30cm (in this case, pretend that the 30x30cm motors have double the weight and power output). It would still be too cramped for the mech.

At the start I wanted a mech to be able to lift 5 tons, then I reduced it to 1-3 tons and it still is a really hard amount to work with…

… I’m starting to question whether or not I should just reduce the carry weight to 500kg or around 300kg…

Out of curiosity, I reduced the power output from 300,000 watts to ¼ of it, 75,000 watts or even less, 50,000 watts. The motors ended up having around 15x15cm in dimensions.

Instead of lifting a maximum 3000 kilograms at 4 m/s to 12 m/s, it would lift 750 kilograms at 4 m/s to 12 m/s. And it would weigh around 1 to 0.5 kilograms with the aluminum wires alone.

The rigid voice coils aren’t good for rotary motions, so it would be interesting to use the “Xangô-33” (the motor with 3 slots and weighting 3 kilograms) on said rotary joints.

Of course, you could simply use a system of pulleys to convert linear to rotary motion. Which I think I will use instead of making an entire electric motor…

Something like this? You would need to add another pulley below it for reverse motion.

hmmm…

Now what?

I initially intended on making every brushless motor in the mech, both for arms and legs, with the same output (300,000 watts), but after this, it seems like I have no choice but to cut down by 3 times the strength of the upper body actuators.

Yes, I did say I would settle for the linear voice coil actuators, but… I just don’t know…

The 3D model I’ve made is more compact, even though it still weighs the same. But that is a rough estimation, the brushless motors could have more ferrite mass for its core and it would be easier to cool down.

I don’t have a proper way of predicting/calculating neither the motor nor the voice coil, but the motor has more available knowledge about it in case something doesn’t work the way I intended…

In any manner, I guess I will just 3D model everything and wonder about it later.

I will start with the brushless motor.

It will have 30cm of diameter, two mirrored stators with 3 slots, 5.8 kilograms of aluminum wire. I will reduce the weight, but I guess it will be easier by starting with it this way.

Every slot would have 6 turns with 4 layers for more or less 0.996 kilograms per slot, 0.996 x 3 slots x 2 stators = 5.9kg. 349,865mm³ is the volume of the coil

I’ve made the coil using the “Screw” modifier on Blender, and I will be forced to delete it because it is slowing the program too much. So in the final archive you will only see a solid C shape for mockup.

And of course, when I changed its shape, it got wider and smaller, meaning it would have a different number of turns and layers when wound around the slot.

My brother that lies in heaven, what the hell?

You have no fricking idea how hard it was to make a single slot on this thing, no matter what I did, nothing would make an arc. I mean, I’ve made an arc in the shape of the coil that would be wound around the slot, but for some reason Blender was saying that these two meshes had the same volume. So I had to make a new one just to be certain.

But when I tried to do it, every attempt was literally:

  1. I watch a tutorial showing how to do it.
  2. I repeat the same exact process on my end.
  3. It doesn’t work.
  4. repeat

The only way I got it to work was using a “Path” option from the “Curve” creation list using Shift+A, then I used a circle from the “Curve” option to use the Modifier “Curve” on the circle so the “Path” was a perfect circle, just so I could use the “Curve” modifier again with the “Array” modifier in a cube to make a continuous arc.

I finally finished the arc with the same dimensions and indeed, the blender was calculating the volume incorrectly. Now I need to redo the process again because the inside of the coil is bigger than the outside.

Well, to my surprise, it only reached 6cm of height, so the motor with the two stators would have 12cm of thickness in total (without the softcore).

I also added 10mm wide holes for structural support and 5mm wide holes for coolant flow.

The motor complete with both stators:

It ended up having 35cm of diameter because of the base.

Its volume is 1689641mm³, and assuming a density of the composite ferrite core to be around 4.5 g/cm³, so a single core would weigh… 7 kilograms.

7 kilograms x 3 cores x 2 stators = 42 kilograms.

Oh god.

I will have to reduce its dimensions and density.

The motor is reduced to ⅓ of its weight/size, the coils weigh more or less 2 kilograms and the ferrite core now weighs 4.3 kilograms. 4.3 x 3 slots x 2 stators = 25.8 kg.

Well… Dang it. Reducing its density it is. I will do that by adding less ferrite powder and more resin/polymer.

Now, reducing further to ⅓ of its size/weight for the arms:

The coils will have more or less 0.7 kilograms.

Observation:

I don’t remember posting this anywhere, but here are some articles with the permeability of iron powder composites based on weight:

Study on Magnetic Properties of Toroidal Cores Composed by Electrolytic Iron Powder With Different Shapes

(PDF) Strain sensing capabilities of iron/epoxy composites

Enhancing the Low-Frequency Induction Heating Effect of Magnetic Composites for Medical Applications

Experimental study on the magnetic permeability of inclusion filled soft polymeric composite for soft-core transformer applications - ScienceDirect

A time discrete scheme for an electromagnetic contact problem with moving conductor 

Another solution for the back-iron problem would be:

 To use the halbach array with the electromagnets in order to concentrate in one direction.
US9558876B2 - Halbach array of electromagnets with substantially contiguous vertical and horizontal cores - Google Patents
Design and Simulation of Superconducting Lorentz Force Electrical Impedance Tomography (LFEIT)  (PDF) Proposal and Challenge of Halbach Array Type Induction Coil for Cooktop Applications

There is the possibility of using an active magnetic shield.

Surround the electromagnets with permanent magnets on all sides (or just weaker electromagnets with a similar force to permanent magnets), so the electromagnets are always interacting with another magnetic field.
A New Coreless Axial Flux Interior Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor With Sinusoidal Rotor Segments | Semantic Scholar (PDF) Design Aspects, Winding Arrangements and Applications of Printed Circuit Board Motors: A Comprehensive Review A New Coreless Axial Flux Interior Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor With Sinusoidal Rotor Segments | Semantic Scholar
(PDF) Improved Analytical Model for Electromagnetic Analysis of Axial Flux Machines With Double-Sided Permanent Magnet Rotor and Coreless Stator Windings  (PDF) Performance analysis of a coreless permanent magnet brushless motor 

Flux Barriers.
They are meant to enhance certain aspects of the electric motor, but they are normally used on synchronous reluctance motors.
There are papers about using them on BLDC motors, but I don’t think I can successfully design one by myself. 

I don’t know if this is a “solution” or not, but:

All ferromagnetic materials have densities from 6 g/cm³ and higher. So, at least 6 times denser than water. Thus, 1 liter of these materials would weigh 6 kilograms or more, unlike all the other low density materials I presented, such as polymers, carbon fibers, fiberglass etc.

Even ferrites (which are chemical compounds of iron and oxygen) have densities around 4.7 g/cm³, which, like I calculated before, is not low-dense enough.

I tried looking if metamaterials could work, but I couldn’t find anything.

Well, asking Web-SearchGPT and looking on the internet for days, it finally showed something interesting:

Nanofoam Exhibits Surprising Magnetic Properties | American Physical Society

The link above doesn’t link to the original article, so here it is: (PDF) Unconventional magnetism in all-carbon nanofoam 

“Carbon nanofoam is structurally distinct from the other four known forms of carbon—graphite, diamond, fullerenes ( buckyballs), and nanotubes. With a density of about 0.002 g/cm³ (2 milligrams), comparable to that of aerogel, carbon nanofoam is one of the lightest known solid substances.

But what's most remarkable about the material, the researchers said, is that unlike other forms of carbon, the nanofoam is ferromagnetic, like a refrigerator magnet. However, at room temperature, the nanofoam's magnetization disappears a few hours after the material is produced.

“...David Tománek of Michigan State University, who collaborated with the group on theoretical interpretation, believes that the carbon clusters in the foam are made up of nanotubes joined together into tetrapods. In these four-legged structures, some carbon atoms have a free electron, one that does not form a chemical bond. These unpaired electrons carry a magnetic moment that may lead to the magnetism."

So, this is still something in earlier stages, in fact, this article is from 2003.

And even then, it doesn’t delve if it has useful ferromagnetism. Just because you can detect it, doesn’t mean it is useful in the macroscale.

Also, while reading the various article's abstract text, it is mentioned that the ferromagnetism in carbon based materials is achieved at the nanoscale and at cryogenic temperatures.

Origin of magnetic moments in carbon nanofoam | Phys. Rev. B (2006, temperature from 2 kelvin, to 50 kelvin and even 300 kelvin [aka room temperature])

Strong paramagnetism and possible ferromagnetism in pure carbon nanofoam produced by laser ablation - ScienceDirect (2005, “maybe ferromagnetism at 90 kelvin” it was written) 

Phys. Rev. B 71, 144424 (2005) - Theory of ferromagnetism in carbon foam (2005)

https://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/asp/jnn/2009/00000009/00000002/art00103  (2009, they use carbon nanotubes [not viable] and achieved a saturation of 0.11 emu/g, which is around 100 to 1000 times smaller than conventional metal ferromagnetic materials)

Investigation on magnetic carbon nanofoam composites (2010, they used 1% by weight of ferrite cobalt [CoFe2O4] in conjunction with the carbon nanofoam, so it obviously has some ferromagnetic property to it)

Unexpected magnetism in nanomaterials (2013) “Carbon nanofoam which contains graphite-like sheets with hyperbolic curvature as in schwarzite exhibits ferromagnetism. Carbon nanofoam produced by high-power laser ablation of glassy carbon in Ar atmosphere exhibits ferromagnetism up to 90 Kelvin (-185ºC)

Phys. Rev. B 74, 214418 (2006) - Ferromagnetic behavior of carbon nanospheres encapsulating silver nanoparticlesshowed weak ferromagnetic behavior up to at least room temperature with a coercive field of 389Oe at 2K and 103Oe at 300K”

Room-temperature ferromagnetism in graphite driven by two-dimensional networks of point defects | Nature Physics (2009, ChatGPT said that it has 10,000–17,000 times smaller saturation than conventional ferromagnetic materials)

Multilevel ferromagnetic behavior of room-temperature bulk magnetic graphite (2018, achieved a saturation of around 0.25 emu/g at room temperature, but the graph makes me think it was around 0.05 or something)

Synthesis and dye separation performance of ferromagnetic hierarchical porous carbon - ScienceDirect (2008, it achieved 11 emu/g, but it has 35% nickel per weight, so it doesn’t counts anyway)

Dunno if all of this was useless or not, but here is a few articles on how to make nano ferrite particles:

Scaling Laws at the Nano Size: The Effect of Particle Size and Shape on the Magnetism and Relaxivity of Iron Oxide Nanoparticle Contrast Agents - PMC 

High saturation magnetization of γ-Fe2O3 nano-particles by a facile one-step synthesis approach | Scientific Reports

Nanoporous Metal Foams - Tappan - 2010 - Angewandte Chemie International Edition - Wiley Online Library

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