The linear motor system is a low-damping system, which will cause residual vibration especially in the high-speed start-stop motion process, and then deteriorates the accuracy of the equipment. By employing an eddy current damper, the residual vibration can be controlled and efficiently reduced. In this paper, an improved dual-sided hybrid excitation eddy current damper (ECD) by using steel-copper plate secondary is proposed. An analytical model is established to explore the relation between the thickness of the steel layer and the copper layer. According to the finite element analysis (FEA), with the increase of the steel thickness, the damping force first increases and then decreases. The maximum damping force is increased by 36.15% compared with that of the pure copper plate. Experimental tests are carried out on the prototype to verify the improvement of the optimized damper. The results show that the peak amplitude of the position error and the settling time are reduced by 1.94 times and 1.80 times, respectively, compared with that of the pure copper plate.

Eddy current damper， Residual vibration， Steel-based copper plated secondary， Damping force