All-Surface Induction Heating With High Efficiency and Space Invariance Enabled by Arraying Squircle Coils in Square Lattice

This paper reports an all-surface induction heating system that enables efficient heating at a constant speed all over the surface independent of the specific location on the surface. In the proposed induction system, squircle coils are placed tangentially in a two-dimensional square lattice as opposed to commonly used hexagonal packing. As a proof-of-concept demonstration, a simple model setup was constructed using a 3×3 coil array along with a steel plate to be inductively heated. To model surface heating, a set of six locations for the plate was designated considering symmetry points. For all of these cases, power dissipated by the system and the plate's transient heating were recorded. Independent from the specific plate position, almost equal heating speeds were measured for the similar levels of dissipated energies in the system. Using full three-dimensional electromagnetic solutions, the experimental results were also verified. The findings indicate that the proposed system is proved to enable energy efficient space-invariant heating in all-surface induction hobs.