Lamination Modeling

Lamination modeling allows you to specify a stacking factor and stacking direction, which represents the direction perpendicular to the plane of the lamination. Cartesian, cylindrical, or spherical coordinate systems can be used to specify the stacking direction.

This lamination model is an alternative way of specifying anisotropic behavior when using laminations (which is a special case that is frequently done). For the frequently encountered case of isotropic laminations (where the global model is anisotropic due to the existence of laminations but the laminations themselves are isotropic), the above picture shows a possible setup. Choose a nonlinear behavior for the material of the lamination with a user specified B-H curve, while the global anisotropy is modeled by specifying a stacking factor and the stacking direction, which is perpendicular to the plane of laminations. In this way, Maxwell can consider a global anisotropy with two orientations — one in the plane of the lamination, and the other in the corresponding orthogonal direction.

Note: If a stacking factor less than 1 is applied to a magnetic core, the flux density plotted will represent the AVERAGE flux density in both the air and the steel (and not the flux density in the steel laminations). The average flux density is reduced as the stacking factor is reduced.

Note: Lamination modeling is supported for magnetostatic, transient solutions and eddy current, where the stacking value is between 0 and 1. Make sure to use appropriate materials with suitable lamination definitions for the solver. Other solvers will ignore the lamination definition in the material.

Note:

When a stacking factor (SF) is used, users need to modify the electrical steel core loss coefficients based on the stacking factor as shown below. As the stacking factor decreases < 1, the core loss coefficients increase.

Kh_scaled = Kh / SF

Kc_scaled = Kc / SF

Ke_scaled = Ke / sqrt(SF)

Lamination Modeling

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