Iron Loss Modeling of Grain-Oriented Electrical Steels in FEM Simulation Environment

Regularly used in power transformers, grain-oriented (GO) steels are also usually chosen for the manufacturing of the stator cores of hydro generator and turbogenerator. These steels are renowned for their high magnetic performances in the rolling direction (RD) (high permeability and low magnetic losses). Nevertheless, in a turbogenerator where GO steels are employed to reduce the size of the stator core, the magnetic flux flows through several successive directions within the plane of the steel. So, the anisotropic behavior of the GO steel has to be considered in the design step of the related devices in order to improve their energy efficiency as well as their diagnosis based on modeling. In this article, an anisotropic phenomenological iron loss model, quite recently developed, has been studied and successfully implemented in a finite element method (FEM) simulation environment. The implementation has been validated against experimental data achieved on an industrial conventional GO grade typically used in turbogenerators. The results show a good agreement of the computational results with the experiments for both quasi-static and dynamic regimes.