Finite element analysis of magnetically induced vibrations of conductive plates

Abstract The coupling effect between the electromagnetic field and mechanical response of a conducting structure is of importance in high energy devices such as fusion reactors. This paper is concerned with numerical modeling of the dynamic field-structure interaction. After the theory of magneto-elasticity for nonferrous conductors is reviewed briefly, a finite element numerical model for fully coupled analysis of the field-structure interaction in conductor plates is developed and corroborated numerically. In developing coupled magneto-plate elements the magnetic field vector rather than the potentials is employed as the primary unknown in electromagnetic field calculation and attention is paid to the performance of the structural elements as well as the electromagnetic elements. Thus the resulting continuum-based, consistent finite element model requires only C °-continuity both in electromagnetic aspect and mechanical aspect. For time integration of the coupled nonlinear system of equations, a partitioned analysis scheme is developed and its numerical implementation details are also presented. Then the proposed numerical model is applied to perform fully coupled analysis of the magnetically induced vibrations of the conducting plates in transient magnetic fields. The Fusion Electromagnetic Induction Experiments(FELIX) are modeled and the numerical results are shown to be in very good agreement with the measured field data.