Abstract
This paper presents the numerical modeling (using the Finite Difference Method-FDM, and Finite Element Method- FEM) of the electromagnetic and thermal fields in a steel piece heated up inside an induction crucible furnace, and the experimental validations. Both modelings have been validated experimentally, so they can be used in designing the equipments and in the numerical control of induction heating process. The program based on FDM can be used in the first stage of designing due to the reduced CPU time. In this stage the inductor parameters and heating time can be estimated, and a study of the influence of diverse factors upon the heating process can be achieved. The FLUX 2D program can be used in the optimization stage, because it allows a more thorough analysis of the phenomena.
Highlights
One of the goals of research in the induction heating domain has been the development of numerical modelings for the computation of the electromagnetic and thermal fields, either in static regime or taking into account the motion, mechanical stress and the phase transitions[4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11]
The Finite Element Method (FEM) approach has been preferred since it involves sparse matrices, that leads to reductions in terms of CPU time and memory requirements, and is more suited for parallel computing[6, 15 and 16]
Modeling of the inductive heating of cylindrical steel piece was achieved with two numerical methods, Finite Difference Method (FDM) and FEM
Summary
Induction heating is used more and more in the industry, due to the advantages offered comparatively with other heating methods for metallic materials (the non-polluting nature of the technological processes, high heating speed, special quality of the products, and accurate control of the technological processes)[1, 2 and 3]. In order to reduce the time of computation and to improve the accuracy, numerical modelings for the optimization of the induction heating processes have been developed[6 and 17-24]. For the optimal control of the induction heating process, the modeling programs (i.e. FLUX) may be coupled for a co-simulation with other packages, dedicated to the electric circuits (i.e., Simulink) [25] This allows for the implementation of some complex control laws and regulation loops, maintaining a very high accuracy of the magnetic and thermal fields computation. THE NUMERICAL MODELING OF THE ELECTROMAGNETIC AND THERMAL FIELDS WITHIN A STEEL PIECE
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