Experimental and numerical analysis of shorted interlaminations in transformer cores

This paper presents an experimental and numerical analysis regarding shorted electrical steel laminations of core of a small transformer core (120 VA single-phase shell-type transformer). Experimental tests were performed to measure the core losses of the transformer with and without shorted electrical steel laminations. Soft solder was utilized to produce the shorted region in the transformer core. Furthermore, 3-D Finite Element (FE) simulations were carried out to compute the eddy current losses in the core of transformer with shorted electrical steel laminations. The laminations of the core and their insulation were taken into account in the transformer model. Finally, several FE simulations were performed to calculate the eddy current losses for several cases, where the location and size of the shorted lamination region was varied in the core of transformer.