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K. Roppert, F. Toth, M. Kaltenbacher:
"Simulation of Sheet Metal Induction Heating Processes with Harmonic Balance FEM";
COMPEL - The International Journal for Computation and Mathematics in Electrical and Electronic Engineering, 1 (2019).

Purpose-The purpose of this paper is to examine a solution strategy for coupled nonlinear magnetic-thermal problems and apply it to the heating process of a thin moving steel sheet. Performing efficientnumerical simulations of induction heating processes becomes ever more important because of fasterproduction development cycles, where the quasi steady-state solution of the problem plays a pivotalrole.Design/methodology/approach-To avoid time-consuming transient simulations, the eddycurrent problem is transformed into frequencydomain and a harmonic balancing scheme is used totake into account the nonlinear BH-curve. The thermal problem is solved in steady-state domain,which is carried out by including a convective term to model the stationary heat transport due to thesheet velocity.Findings-The presented solution strategy is compared toa classical nonlinear transient referencesolution of the eddy current problem and shows good convergence, even for a small number ofconsidered harmonics.Originality/value-Numerical simulations of induction heating processes are necessary to fullyunderstand certain phenomena, e.g. local overheating of areas in thin structures. With the presented approachit is possible to perform large 3D simulations without excessive computational resources by exploiting certainproperties of the multiharmonic solution of the eddy current problem. Together with the use ofnonconforming interfaces, the overall computational complexity of the problem can be decreasedsignificantly.

nduction heating, Multiphysics, Finite element method, Coupled systems,Computational electromagnetics, Magnetic nonlinearity

http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/COMPEL-12-2018-0489