The word "actuate" is correct and usable in written English.
It is typically used in contexts involving the initiation or activation of a process or mechanism. Example: "The engineer designed the system to actuate the valves automatically when pressure levels reached a certain threshold." Alternatives include "activate" or "trigger."
Though not cheap, using digital processors to send electronic signals down a wire to servo motors that mechanically actuate the control system in question reduces the number of moving parts that can break, get jammed or simply wear out.
In one respect, we join in the complaint, but with motives of a different kind from those which actuate many of our fellow grumblers.
Passage of direct electric current through the wire creates a magnetic field that draws a core or plunger, usually of iron, into the solenoid; the motion of the plunger often is used to actuate switches, relays, or other devices.
Nonpacifists would conclude that pacifist or nonviolent methods can be effective only against a power that has no very strong motives for going to extremes of suppression or one that is governed at least in part by the same moral scruples that actuate the pacifists themselves.
Diesel engine, any internal-combustion engine in which air is compressed to a sufficiently high temperature to ignite diesel fuel injected into the cylinder, where combustion and expansion actuate a piston.
He was hopeful, however, he can gain an advantage if he masters the new starting procedure of being allowed to actuate only one of his two clutch pedals, after the FIA ruled that drivers had to set their own clutch bite point with the other one before they leave the pits for the grid and may no longer rely on advice from their engineers.
He was arrested twice but never charged and contended both arrests were "actuated by malice".
A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views.The author of this radical, class-conscious vision of society was James Madison, America's fourth* president and co-author of its constitution.
It consists of a pendulum swung on a pivot and actuated by a hand-wound clockwork whose escapement (a motion-controlling device) makes a ticking sound as the wheel passes a pallet.
The piston was first actuated by the ignition of a small charge of gunpowder and then returned to its initial position when the hot gases of combustion cooled, leaving a partial vacuum.
Today a small computer is used as the controller in an NC machine tool, and the program is actuated from computer memory rather than punched paper tape.
