structural:reformatting, quality:correction
Ironless or coreless rotor motor

The coreless or ironless DC motor is a specialized permanent magnet DC motor. Optimized for rapid acceleration, the rotor is constructed without an iron core. The rotor can take the form of a winding-filled cylinder, or a self-supporting structure comprising only wire and bonding material. The rotor can fit inside the stator magnets; a magnetically soft stationary cylinder inside the rotor provides a return path for the stator magnetic flux. A second arrangement has the rotor winding basket surrounding the stator magnets. In that design, the rotor fits inside a magnetically soft cylinder that can serve as the motor housing, and provides a return path for the flux.

Because the rotor is much lower mass than a conventional rotor, it can accelerate much more rapidly, often achieving a mechanical time constant under one millisecond. This is especially true if the windings use aluminum rather than (heavier) copper. The rotor has no metal mass to act as a heat sink; even small motors must be cooled. Overheating can be an issue for these designs.

The vibrating alert of cellular phones can be generated by cylindrical permanent-magnet motors, or disc-shaped types that have a thin multipolar disc field magnet, and an intentionally unbalanced molded-plastic rotor structure with two bonded coreless coils. Metal brushes and a flat commutator switch power to the rotor coils.

Related limited-travel actuators have no core and a bonded coil placed between the poles of high-flux thin permanent magnets. These are the fast head positioners for rigid-disk ("hard disk") drives. Although the contemporary design differs considerably from that of loudspeakers, it is still loosely (and incorrectly) referred to as a "voice coil" structure, because some earlier rigid-disk-drive heads moved in straight lines, and had a drive structure much like that of a loudspeaker.