3D FINITE ELEMENT MODELLING OF ELECTROMAGNETS AND TRANSFORMERS BY USING A PARTICULAR SCALAR POTENTIAL TECHNIQUE

The design of several electromagnetic devices, such as magnets and transformers, leads to a 3D magnetostatic field analysis. Although such problems can be solved by using vector potential formulations, scalar potential techniques seem to be more efficient because of the reduced number of unknowns they introduce. Even these methods, however, present certain drawbacks, depending on the way the scalar potential is defined: considerable cancellation errors in iron parts, difficulties to simulate multiply connected iron cores, a complicated way to compute a source field distribution.