Let me preface my answer with a disclaimer: All of my experience PWM'ing motors is with speed control of cooling fans. Your application will certainly differ, at least a little bit.
The way I find the minimum duty cycle, I look for the minimum that will allow the motor to start spinning. With standard muffin fans, this is about 40%. Then I add a small margin just to be safe. I find this by applying 0% duty cycle and slowly ramping it up until the motor starts spinning.
This startup power is higher than the amount of power required to keep the motor spinning once it has already spun up. With fans, this is somewhere in the 20-30% range. In other words, if I wanted to spin a fan really slow, I would have to apply 40% to get it moving and then I could back down to 20-30%.
Normally, just to be safe, I do not go below the startup power. That way I can be sure that the motor is spinning, although it does limit the minimum speed that I can do.
There are problems with this, however. Many things can affect the startup power requirements. Temperature, motor loading, age, dust, different motor lots, etc. You have to take all this into account, and built in some power margin.
Alternatively, you have to monitor your motor through a tachometer or something similar. Then have some motor control software do the appropriate thing if the motor is spinning too fast or too slow. Good motor control software will automatically take into account the startup power and other things.
If you don't want to write motor control software then you have little choice but to empirically measure what the startup power requirement is for your system and then add some more for margin. And hope that you added enough.
If you separate out the solenoid coil into its two main parts
1) resistance
2) inductance
you can determine the duty required reasonably accurately
What duty required to overcome the resistive component?
determine the voltage drop (pull-in current * resistance)
determine the duty to overcome this (Vr/Vdc)*100
What duty required to manage the current?
utilising \$V = L\frac{\delta i}{\delta t}\$
and knowing the voltage you are applying to the coil (Vdc - Vr), the inductance and the ripple you want to tolerate. This will give you an ON-TIME.
With the duty known for the resistive component and now the duty for the inductive component, a reasonable estimate of the required duty for pullin & hold can be determined.
Best Answer
You can change the waveform and period, duty cycle is "the fraction of one period in which a signal or system is active".
As long as you have a period, you can determine a duty cycle.
One different type of PWM I have encountered is nonconsecutive PWM.
(on a Siti DM163 LED controller)