For compensating the gap of present investigations, which did not consider the effect of skin depth before, a novel method is also proposed to obtain the eddy current force. At the beginning, the separating principle of eddy current separator (ECS) is given. Then, based on boundary conditions and the eddy current equations, the internal magnetic flux density, eddy current density and eddy current force density of non-ferrous metal are deduced. By calculating the double integral of eddy current density, the internal eddy current of non-ferrous metal is achieved. The theoretical calculation method (TCM) for solving the eddy current force in the process of non-ferrous metal sorting is proposed. Moreover, to verify the correctness of TCM, taking 24-pole and 30-pole magnetic roller as examples, the finite element models of static and transient magnetic field are established respectively. Additionally, the correctness of TCM is proven by finite element method (FEM) when the x-axis and y-axis component of eddy current force is calculated. At the end, by the theoretical analysis and derivation derived in this paper, based on the relationship between the relative position of N and S poles of the magnetic roller and non-ferrous metal, the internal eddy current force are analyzed by the consistency between the direction of the internal magnetic flux density and the eddy current of non-ferrous metal. The influence of the size relationship between the non-ferrous metal and a single magnetic pole on the separation effect is discussed.