Thermal Analysis of Giant Magnetostrictive Transducer Based on Stress-Independent Electromagnetic-Thermal Coupling Modeling

The temperature sensitivity of giant magnetostrictive materials (GMMs) is a key factor affecting the performance of giant magnetostrictive transducers (GMTs). Attributed to the complicated configuration inside GMTs and the multivariate-dependent characteristics of GMMs, thermal analysis of GMTs is pretty complex and has to be integrated with magnetic and loss analysis. With the difficulty of model extension and high computational cost, the finite element (FE) method has limitations in the electromagnetic-thermal analysis for multivariate-dependent GMTs. In view of the above, this article proposes a novel electromagnetic-thermal coupling (EMTC) model based on the equivalent circuit models (ECMs) by combining it with a modified multivariate Jiles-Atherton (JA) model. By cyclically iterating the model parameters, it can be performed modularly in MATLAB/Simulink to accurately estimate the electromagnetic-thermal behaviors with a low computational cost. Given the complex distribution of magnetic field, loss, and temperature, a detailed electromagnetic-thermal analytic model is established. The modified multivariate JA model, which considers the sensitivity of electromagnetic losses of GMM with excitation amplitude, frequency, and temperature, replaced the conventional loss prediction. Taking a longitudinal vibration GMT (LVGMT) as a study case, experimental investigations are performed, which verify the accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed EMTC method in transient temperature response with about five times the computational speed of FE simulations.