Coupling of PSO and FE methods for electrical conductivity identification of materials used in eddy current separator

In this work, an identification of the electrical conductivity of material 𝜎 was carried out. This is accomplished by formulating and solving an inverse problem based on the minimization of an objective function using the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) method. Such a function represents the difference between the experimentally measured final ejection position and that numerically computed by solving the material magnetic separation problem. For this, the coupled magnetic field and the material dynamic governing equations were numerically solved using the finite element (FE) and Runge–Kutta (RK4) methods. The strong correlation observed between the computed and measured final position of the separated material verifies the accuracy of the proposed identifying approach.