COMPEL: The International Journal for Computation and Mathematics in Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce a simplified method to calculate an estimation of local forces acting on a body submitted to electric or magnetic fields. With experimentations, the method is thereafter evaluated.

Design/methodology/approach – When an external strength exists on a body, its deformation is an effect always observed. With materials with low elasticity modulus, such a deformation becomes visible and its measurement can be used to validate numerical simulations. Using similarities between electric and magnetic behaviour laws, magnetic problems can be modelled with an electric field approach and studied with an experiment that also uses an electric field.

Findings – Geometrical singularities and their effects on calculations are not always well taken into account by a finite element resolution. An adaptive mesh refinement is often required. If such mesh refinement is refused, another solution can be explored. The goal is to know the external stress distribution induced by the field. The methods only focus on this stress distribution and assume that the magnetic or electric field distribution is imprecise when it is calculated near geometrical singularities. The stress distributions suggested are verified with experiments.

Originality/value – Using new materials with particular physical properties provides a new concept of experimental validation.