This article is part of the Handbook for Mechatronics by Newton C. Braga.
The simplest way to drive a solenoid is conecting a power supply source with the nominal voltage as shown by the figure 1.
But, in more complex projects electronic circuits can be used to drive a solenoid using weak signals as the ones sourced by the parallel por of a PC, logic circuits, microprocessors and microcontrollers or low power sensors.
Figure 2 shows some configurations that can be used to drive solenoids.
(a) Direct driver
(b) Bipolar transistor
(c) Two stages bipolar transistor
(d) AC driver
(e) Darlington Transistor
(f) Power MOSFET
(g) SCR
(h) IGBT
(i) Dedicated IC
