Software for Industrial Design
Vita Technology Pvt. Ltd. develops and commercializes software used in permanent magnet, brushless DC motor and magnetizing fixture design. Our base application, called Samarium, is available with or without the Cobalt module (used for the design of magnetizing fixtures for ring and arc magnets). The release of Cobalt as a stand-alone application is planned. Our software is licensed on a yearly basis, and updates are made available to all licensed users.
What is Samarium?
Samarium is an innovative tool to help in the electromagnetic design of three-phase brushless radial-field, surface-mounted and interior buried spoke oriented permanent-magnet DC motors
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Slotted and slotless motors, inner rotor and outer rotor motors, as well as motors with different magnet geometries can be easily designed using Samarium. It combines a powerful design and modeling engine based on analytical equations with industrial strength multi-order FEA (finite-element analysis). The post-processor allows easy visualization of the results and high flexibility.
Samarium can be used for rapid response to new custom design requests. Most preliminary designs can be done within 30 minutes or less and refining the preliminary design may be even faster. For new designs, validation of the analytical design is made possible with the integrated finite-element engine.
Highly accurate predictions of motor performance are possible with the analytical engine. For existing designs, Samarium effortlessly and accurately predicts the resulting performance parameters with changes in motor length, winding, magnet material, lamination steel material, etc., in just a few seconds. With built in database support for magnet, lamination & rotor steel, and magnet wire materials, designing a new motor is easy, straightforward and accurate.
Samarium includes several features that are useful in the manufacturing process of the motor such as allowing export of the motor design in DXF format, providing zero back EMF positions (for hall sensor locations), allowing predicted performance changes with forced sensor errors, etc..
Features in Samarium software
Some of the features in Samarium are listed below. More information can be obtained from the Online help files.
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Parametric motor modeling, no CAD software required
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Three dimensional models of all motor components are automatically generated
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Flexible analytical design engine which allows for several practical parameters to be adjusted
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Industrial strength mesh generator which allows user intervention, superb mesh refinement capability
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Robust FEA engine with refinement capability and Gradient Recovery based error estimation
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Automatic h-adaptive mesh refinement controlled by FEA, upto third order triangular elements
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Automatic air gap force error calculation and refinement for accurate cogging torque calculations
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Several user controllable parameters for highly saturated non-linear FEA as in designing magnetizing fixtures
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Parallel processing capability (when applicable) using multiple processors/cores for time saving
New versions of the software, post April 2010 support advanced texture rendering and background images to produce photo-realistic images of the motor. These can be used for presentations, etc. or for a realistic image of the motor and sub components before producing any parts.
Licensing Samarium
Samarium is licensed on a yearly basis, and updates are made available to all licensed users. For specific details about licensing options, please contact us. Fully functional versions of Samarium can be provided for evaluation purposes with a time limited license.
History and development
Samarium design software is the result of more than 10 years of permanent-magnet brushless DC motor design experience, as well as hands-on experience of assembly and testing. Hundreds of paper designs have been made using Samarium, and it has been fine-tuned with the prototyping of many of those designs. Several established production lines are already manufacturing motors designed with Samarium.
Documentation and on-line help
The help file for the latest version of Samarium is available through the menu on the left. It provides details of using the software for design as well as a brief overview of the software itself. For more details, please contact us.
Optional modules and extensions
Samarium is offered in different modular configurations:
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Samarium with integrated finite element analysis and Cobalt (see below)
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Samarium with integrated finite element analysis
The (optional) Cobalt module provides help in the design of permanent magnet magnetizing fixtures, using analytical and finite-element analysis for multipole ring and arc magnets.
Availability of Cobalt as a stand-alone application is planned.
Also available are special optional modules for Samarium:
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Analytical optimization assistant
See the full sequence (~3 Mb)).
The Analytical optimization engine allows several parameters to be varied between a user defined minimum, maximum, and number of steps. Several different constraints can be imposed and after simulation of all steps, only results that have passed the constraint criteria are presented to the user. This rapidly reduces optimization time and allows the user to refine an already refined solution.
Several other parameters can be varied as well such that solutions close to true global optimizations are possible.
Services
In addition to developing and licensing industrial design software, Vita Technology also provides the following services directly to clients:
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Permanent magnet brushless DC motor design / modeling services.
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Permanent magnet magnetizing fixture design services.
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Complete parametrized software modeling of special types of permanent magnet brushless DC motors to enable general use (ex., motors with a special type of winding shape - this will usually result in a custom module of Samarium available only to that specific customer).
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Assistance in the manufacture of prototypes (complete motors or just specific parts).
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Assistance in the optimization of motors for very high efficiency.
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Improvement of existing motor designs to suit new specifications.
If you require any of these services, please contact us.
Contact us
For further information about Samarium (including licensing), or for any comments about this website, please contact us using one of the methods listed below.
Vita Technology Private Limited
(Samarium)
3/1, Annaiah Road, Yelachenahalli
off 10th km, Kanakapura Road
Bangalore - 560 111, Karnataka, India
Vita Technology
+91 - (0) 80 - 2666 - 3164
Fax : +91-80-2666 3992
What is Cobalt?
Cobalt is a sister product to Samarium. It is used to design magnetizing fixtures for multi-pole ring magnets (for both inner rotor and outer rotor motors). Cobalt is designed specifically for ring magnets and cannot be used for breadloaf magnets. It does provide limited support for arc magnets. All magnetization patterns are radially oriented.
Cobalt has been integrated into Samarium. It may be available as a stand alone product in a few months. If you are interested in using Cobalt, you will have to use Samarium and access the Cobalt module from there. Please see the Online help or the Samarium page for additional information.