Improved Flynn Device Model

Feb 7, 2012
I spent a little time with FEMM 4.2 working up a magnetostatic model. FEMM is a GNU license piece of software from David Meeker and you can get it from http://www.femm.info/wiki/HomePage. It's pretty easy to use for basic modelling but there does seem to be quite a learning curve for anything more complex. Still, it did what i wanted. The model is 12cm by 10 cm and shows a laminated steel frame with four coils placed central to each leg of the fram and two N50 magnets either side of the top and bottom coils. To start with i pulsed 1 amp at 8 volts through each of the top and bottom coils as per the standard flynn device, which is a power consumption of 16 watts, and the flux movement was pretty much as you would have thought. But it got interesting when i pulsed the left hand side coil only. I could get this down to a 0.5 amp pulse at 4 volts to achieve the same effect as the 16 watts version but with only 2 watts of power consumption. This seemed pretty interesting so i decided to reverse the pulse through the left hand coil with the result that you can see. The next step - build the thing! Anyway, i thought this was worth sharing so enjoy