Patent ID: 6930422

Claim:
An electrical machine comprising: three or more elongated parallel multi-pole permanent magnets, located side-by-side and aligned such that south poles of adjacent magnets face each other and north poles of adjacent magnets face each other, the magnets including two endmost magnets and one or more non-endmost magnets; magnetically permeable cores, each core being elongated to thereby define a lengthwise direction and a core profile transverse to the lengthwise direction, the cores being parallel with and interspersed between the magnets, with each core located between a corresponding pair of adjacent magnets, the cores being interconnected so as to be fixed relative to each other, and the magnets being interconnected so as to move in unison, in the lengthwise direction, relative to the cores; coils wound about the profile of each core and sequentially disposed along the length of the core; and a ferromagnetic backplate fixedly capping each of the two endmost magnets, with none of the non-endmost magnets being capped by a backplate to enable flux lines to extend through each non-endmost magnet from one adjacent core to another.