Time harmonic eddy currents in non‐linear media

Abstract

One way to deal with non‐linearity in the case of time harmonic excitation of the electric and magnetic fields in ferromagnetic media is to introduce an effective material to model the ferromagnetic region. This fictitious material is constant throughout a period but inhomogeneous and it takes into account the non‐linear relationship between the field quantities. Several methods to create an effective magnetization curve are presented and different finite element formulations are applied to these. Some of these methods are known from the literature for 1D and 2D problems but not for 3D ones and they have only be used for a magnetic vector potential formulation so far. In the present paper they are extended for general vector and scalar potential formulations. Further possible ways to introduce such an effective material to take into account saturation effects are shown. All these different methods are investigated on a non‐linear 3D time harmonic eddy current problem using complex formalism.