Cogging force accounts for important downsides in several aspects, namely causing the speed ripples, inducing vibrations and noises, and increasing the difficulty of position control. All of these negative affects will become more obvious, particularly under light loads and low speeds. So if the cogging force can be kept as minimal as possible, or even completely disappeared, the operational performance of motors will be improved significantly. As our preliminary study indicates, the magnitude of cogging force is influenced by construction of motors, which govern a number of motor parameters. In this paper, the cogging force of a novel type of permanent magnet excited transverse flux linear synchronous motor will be minimized in two steps. First, theoretical analysis will be employed to obtain the most influential parameter on cogging force. Second, Taguchi’s method including 2D finite element analysis is applied to minimize the cogging force. Analytical and simulation results indicate the usefulness of our approach in practice
