Incorporating the Soft Magnetic Material Degradation to Numerical Simulations

This article focuses on the numerical implementation of a continuous model for local degradation in soft magnetic materials. Cutting and punching processes required for producing electric machines impact the magnetic properties of soft magnetic materials. A simplified but effective model for considering local degradation of soft magnetic materials is defined and experimentally validated. The proposed model is then implemented in the source code of numerical simulation tool to assign directly at the mesh level the material characteristics as a function of the distance from the cut edge. The procedure as well as the flow chart for the implementation is described in detail. The proposed method allows avoiding the drawbacks of multilayer approaches and consequently increased model complexity and a required finer mesh density. A comparison between simulation results and measurements of lamination rings is presented and discussed.