A novel variant of the H-Φ field formulation for magnetostatic and eddy current problems

Abstract

Purpose

The paper presents a new variant of the H-Φ field formulation for solving 3-D magnetostatic and frequency domain eddy current problems. The suggested formulation uses the vector and scalar tetrahedral elements within conducting and non-conducting domains, respectively. The presented numerical method is capable of solving multiply connected regions and eliminates the need for computing the source current density and the source magnetic field before the actual magnetostatic and eddy current simulations. The obtained magnetostatic results are verified by comparison against the corresponding results of the standard stationary current distribution analysis combined with the Biot-Savart integration. The accuracy of the eddy current results is demonstrated by comparison against the classical A-A-f approach in frequency domain.

Design/methodology/approach

The theory and implementation of the new H-Φ magnetostatic and eddy current solver is presented in detail. The method delivers reliable results without the need to compute the source current density and source magnetic field before the actual simulation.

Findings

The proposed H-Φ produce radically smaller and considerably better conditioned equation systems than the alternative A-A approach, which usually requires the unphysical regularization in terms of a low electric conductivity value within the nonconductive domain.

Originality/value

The presented numerical method is capable of solving multiply connected regions and eliminates the need for computing the source current density and the source magnetic field before the actual magnetostatic and eddy current simulations.

Citation

Smajic, J. (2019), "A novel variant of the H-Φ field formulation for magnetostatic and eddy current problems", COMPEL - The international journal for computation and mathematics in electrical and electronic engineering, Vol. 38 No. 5, pp. 1545-1561. https://doi.org/10.1108/COMPEL-12-2018-0536