A Thomson coil type actuator is applied as the driving unit in an arc eliminator system. To eliminate the arc efficiently, the speed of the actuator is required as fast as possible with certain limit of the exciting current. Therefore, the dynamic characteristics of the Thomson coil type actuator should be analyzed in an effective way. In this paper, a novel solving technique has been developed based on the equivalent circuit model which is set up by dividing the conducting plate into multi segments. To guarantee the calculation accuracy and improve the calculation efficiency, an adaptive refinement algorithm is suggested based on the field continues condition. The proposed method has been verified by the FEM calculation and experiment. The influence of circuit and plate parameters to the performance of the actuator is also investigated, from which a reasonable set of parameters can be found.