Analysis of Magnetic Properties of Soft Magnetic Composite Using Magnetic Circuits Generated by Discrete Element Method

Abstract

This article proposes an effective method based on a magnetic circuit for the analysis of magnetic properties of soft magnetic composite (SMC). The present method constructs an imitation of SMC by the discrete element method (DEM), which analyzes the motion of the iron particles in SMC. Based on the resulting particle configuration, the magnetic circuit is generated, and the circuit equation is solved to evaluate the macroscopic permeability and the eddy current loss of the SMC assuming that the magnetic saturation is negligible. The microscopic material properties of the iron particles, such as electrical conductivity and insulation layer thickness, are identified, so that the difference between the computed and measured macroscopic properties of SMC is minimal. The proposed method can effectively deal with thin insulation layers, whose finite element modeling results in a huge number of elements. The computational cost for the proposed method is much lower than that of the finite element method (FEM). Furthermore, the computed macroscopic permeability and eddy current loss are shown to be consistent with the measured results with different filling rates.