Coupled Thermal-Electromagnetic Simulation of Magnetic Controlled Reactor Using Finite Element Method

Owing to the special working principle and construction of a magnetic controlled reactor (MCR), the temperature of some spots in its iron core during operation can be extremely high and even lead to equipment damage. To avoid this, the heat-dissipation in the core should be improved. To optimize the structure reasonably, simulation analysis of MCR should be performed in multiple trigger angles according to actual scenario. In this study, the finite element method (FEM) is used to establish a thermal-electromagnetic simulation model of a single-phase MCR. Homogenization method is applied to reduce the time consumption of modeling and computation. Simulation results in finite element (FE) model and small-slope model are presented and compared, including electric performance and characteristic of saturation level (β). The comparison results show that the FE model established in this paper is more consistent with the actual situation. Magnetic valve factor (MVF) is presented to analyze the variation law for the magnetic induction intensity, iron loss and temperature of MCR in multiple trigger angles. It is clear that the magnetic induction intensity, iron loss and temperature are always high in the magnetic valve. Therefore, the design of magnetic valve structure should be paid more attention.