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UGM 2002 redux

User Group Meetings (UGM) are a great way for us to showcase the vast improvements we've made to our product line. Although much of the discussions and presentations at the UGM revolve around what has transpired in the past year, an underlying theme to the meetings has always been what future developments we have in store. Quite often, the dialogue between the presenter and the UGM participants can lead to solutions previously thought of as impractical or impossible. This is where these meetings can be so beneficial -- through discussions and demonstrations, you may discover that a solution to your particular application needs may be readily available now or in some future release. Unfortunately, not every user is able to attend, thereby limiting their accessibility to this first-hand information. Hopefully, with this UGM recap, we can provide Infolytica's network of users with a sense of what was discussed.

The full presentations are available for viewing in a section specifically created for UGM 2002, in our Online Customer Support Center (OCSC).

Making optimization work in an industrial environment

The presentation included a live demo of a loudspeaker optimization problem.  The optimization problem, a 2-d axisymmetric loudspeaker magnet with 13 free parameters, was optimized while the presentation was being given.  At the end of the 20-minute talk, the displayed result had achieved about a 30% reduction in the mass of the loudspeaker, without reducing the field strength in the air gap.

The optimization tool is easy to apply to any optimization problem since it automatically detects any parameters in a MagNet model. The optimization engine is designed to efficiently handle more than just one or two variables.

Magnetic hysteresis modeling in MagNet

Modeling material properties effectively is critical to being able to solve problems accurately. In many problems, the hysteretic properties of magnetic materials are of crucial importance. Such problems include any system using permanent magnets or involving magnetic recording. In addition, hysteresis leads to losses in the device, which can give rise to local heating. In its basic form, MagNet cannot handle magnetic hysteresis, but it does have a facility whereby the user can over-ride the internal material model and add in any model that may be reasonable. In a recent piece of work, this facility, which is a dynamic link library, was modified to allow for some form of hysteresis to be included in the magnetic analysis -- two popular methods of representing hysteresis (i.e, the Jiles-Atherton and Preisach models) were implemented.

Geometric & coil modeling

The presentation on Coils and Modeling highlighted the new and powerful features of MagNet that now make coil modeling in 3-d much easier and more powerful.  The multi-segment sweep makes it possible to create complex coils, and MagNet now automatically finds the conducting path between coil terminals for both solid and stranded coils, as well as automatically finding holes in conducting media.

Examples of these complex geometries can be found in the Gallery section of our web site.

Dynamic performance of electrical machines - Brushless DC motor

This talk discussed how MagNet's Transient with motion solver is used in applications where motional effects are important to the accurate analysis of the device. The brushless DC motor was presented as a good example of where simulation involves the electrical characteristics of the driving circuit coupled with the forces due to the electromagnetic fields and other loads. In this application, the electric circuit driving the device consists of position-controlled switches, diodes, and the source. Two types of analyses were demonstrated. In one, the rotor was set to run at constant velocity and the resulting torque ripple was examined. In the other, the effect of changing load was examined as the rotor starts from standstill and runs up to a constant velocity.

Incorporating thermal effects in magnetic devices

Two presentations addressed the issues involved in simulating thermal effects in induction heating and induction hardening applications. It was shown that the two-way coupling between the magnetic analysis and the thermal analysis, and the ability of the system to model all material properties (magnetic and thermal) as a function of temperature, are key in getting realistic results. Both applications - induction heating and induction hardening - require a transient thermal analysis coupled to a time-harmonic magnetic analysis.

It was shown that, to accurately simulate the process of induction heating or induction hardening, a coupled electromagnetic-thermal analysis is required that computes both the electromagnetic fields and the temperature distribution over the entire period, starting with when the power is switched on and ending when the required temperature is reached in the areas of interest.

In both of these applications, the areas that are being treated are raised to very high temperatures. The BH properties change significantly across the range of temperature values encountered and accurate modeling of this variation is key in performing an accurate simulation. The same applies to the variation in resistivity of the material - as the temperature rises, the resistivity goes up, and as a result, the depth of penetration for the eddy currents change during the transient process.

Sharp Edges and Thin Layers

This first part of this presentation discussed how, mathematically, fields are infinite at sharp edges and that, consequently, the computed field values increase without limit, as the mesh is refined. It was shown that this is true even in the presence of saturable magnetic materials.

MagNet provides mechanisms for efficiently handling two types of thin layers, which would otherwise be computationally expensive to model:

    • sheets of current on the surface of conductors in time-harmonic problems, and
    • sheets of highly permeable material in magnetostatic problems.

As expected, the accuracy of the thin-layer models increases, as the layer thickness tends to zero.

Modeling unbounded problems in MagNet, ElecNet, and ThermNet

There are many methods described in the available literature for representing open boundary problems, i.e., problems in which the field extends beyond the main problem area. The difficulty in representing the exterior region is commonly seen as one of the main disadvantages of a finite element approach. However, in two-dimensional problems, an elegant solution exists using the Kelvin transformation. The main approach for this method is to enclose the region of interest within a circular boundary. All of the exterior space can then be transformed to fit inside a second circle, and then the two circles can be joined at their boundary. This process can be easily implemented in MagNet, ElecNet, and ThermNet through a Visual Basic program. In fact, an ActiveX® executable has been developed and it can be accessed in the two-dimensional codes as a simple menu button in the Boundaries menu.

Nodal Forces

This presentation provided an overview of the features of the nodal forces scripting application.  This script calculates the forces of statically solved models in MagNet and ElecNet.  Output includes visual feedback in the form of contour, shaded and arrow plots and text file output.  Forces are reported on a component-by-component basis and on a node-by-node basis.

Improved Mesh Generator

The major improvements made to our 2D mesh generator were the focal point of this discussion. Some of the topics included:

    • New architecture for meshing.
    • A faster and more robust mesher that requires less user interaction.
    • 2D refinement controls such as the setting of a component-wise maximum element size, and the Curvature Refinement Ratio (CRR) feature.
    • Partial overlap is now supported in the new mesher.

Introduction to Scripting

This presentation covered how easy it is to get started with scripting and where to get the resources to learn. It explained the terminology that is used: ActiveX, interface, handle, object, event, etc. It presented the organization of the interfaces to help users understand how and why the scripting commands are structured the way they are. Each interface was listed by importance and summarized. Following this, some concrete examples of how to write a script and a form were given, as well as a brief overview of event handling. Finally, a comparison of development environments was given.

How Best To Use Scripting

An overview on how best to go about creating a script. Weighed the benefits of using script forms versus script files.  Compared Visual Basic scripting with Visual Basic for Applications and Visual Basic.

Post-processing with Scripting

This discussion focussed on how scripting provides an automated approach to post processing. Some key points of the presentation were:

  • Programmability of the rich set of scripting commands enables a versatile range of operations to be performed, beyond the basic operations that are available through the graphical user interface (GUI).
  • All of the global quantities computed by MagNet, ElecNet, and ThermNet are accessible via scripting commands.
  • The scripting commands for working with Fields enable Field objects to be created, representing any of the quantities that are available on the Field page of the GUI. Additional commands to create user-defined fields enable external data to be imported into the system for visualization and further analysis.
  • Field objects can be further manipulated using a wide range of mathematical and visualization operations.

Event Handlers

This presentation provided many examples of event handlers to give the users an idea of how powerful this mechanism is in allowing them to customize Infolytica's applications for their own use. The examples covered menu customization, view customization, model building, meshing diagnostics, post-processing and report generation. It also displayed the power of the Document_OnParseCommand() event handler to fix bugs and augment the functionality of the program by generating a time-varying animation of a set of time-harmonic solutions that were coupled to a transient-thermal solution. Finally, a sneak preview of what we are developing with event handlers was shown, using the magnetic-transient/thermal-transient solution coupling as an example.

Linking to Third Party Software

An overview of how to access third party software from within Infolytica Products and vice versa.  Included snippets of code on how to create an object handle for MagNet from Excel and MATLAB®.