Design of Microscale Magnetic Controls for Magnetic-Field Driven Actuation

Magnetic actuators require reproducible, small-scale approaches for controlling the magnetic field gradient and direction used to drive the actuation. Here a system of two control magnets is designed to generate the local magnetic fields that are required to actuate a magnetic system and elicit microscale, local deflections. The two control magnets are engineered to have magnetizations preferentially pointing along two orthogonal axes, leading to the coupling of the magnetic flux densities between them and the generation of a field (and gradient) localized with micrometer resolution. To demonstrate the ability of this field to exert an actuation force on a magnetic material, a system composed of the two control magnets and a microscale magnetic beam/cantilever is designed and simulated.