Study of 3-D magnetic components by means of "double 2-D" methodology

The magnetic field in many magnetic components, namely toroids and EE cores, has a three-dimensional (3-D) distribution. Energy and losses calculation in these particular structures makes necessary the use of 3-D techniques that accounts for all 3-D effects. The calculation of the energy and losses is needed in order to obtain any transformer model. This paper presents a procedure that allows the calculation of energy and losses in 3-D structures using two-dimensional (2-D) approaches. This procedure accounts for 3-D effects, solving each magnetic component by means of two different analyses but using 2-D finite-element analysis (FEA) solvers instead of 3-D. The main advantages of this procedure are that all geometrical and frequency effects are taken into account using 2-D FEA solvers. 3-D FEA solvers are not applicable to analyze most practical cases because of the complexity in the geometry. Therefore, the use of this method is not only advantageous from the point of view of time reduction, but also it is a solution for many cases where 3-D solvers are not a feasible solution. Some experimental results illustrate the application of the methodology, which is especially useful to study the influence of the winding strategy in toroidal structures and to design integrated magnetics in order to adjust the coupling coefficient between each pair of windings before the component construction.